One of the great ironies and great frustrations of my career teaching first-year college writing was having students enter our class armed with a whole host of writing strategies which they had been explicitly told they needed to know “for college,” and yet those strategies—primarily the following of prescriptive templates—were entirely unsuited to the experience students were going to have over the next 15 weeks of our course (and beyond).

I explored and diagnosed these frustrations in Why They Can’t Write , and while many other writing teachers in both high school and college shared that they’d seen and been equally (or more) frustrated by the same things. In the intervening years, there’s been some progress, but frankly, not enough, primarily because the structural factors that dis

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