Why Teach Composition?

I think the simplest answer to this question is: to advance students' understanding of writing. There are two views of teaching comp, in my understanding of it--from one view, comp is a requirement and will help students learn academic writing, so that they will be able to APPLY that to other courses (presumably the heart of their education), or to their major fields. The other, second view, is the one I subscribe to--that is you can't learn how to write unless you read a great deal and write a great deal about what you read, and receive thorough feedback on your writing. In other words, comp is a field in itself that is not given its' due, it is a legit course like a course in social anthropology, or the psychology of stereotypes etc. It is important in itself for what it has to provide students. When my sister taught undergrad comp at UC Berkeley for 8 years, she taught a novel a week. Berkeley is literature heavy, just as Purdue seems to be rhetoric heavy. However, the rhetoric provided in textbooks such as the Allyn & Bacon book teach lightweight, high-school rhetoric. It seems to be up to the creativity and effort of the instructor to make those materials practical and workable, and at times I feel that we underestimate what the students are capable of. In my brief experience at Purdue, Indiana undergrads are just as proud to be here as people in California are proud to be a CAL or UCLA. Many Purdue students are coming from AP H.S. courses that are above the textbooks we use. Some of the students in comp are seniors whose critical thinking abilities soar above what some of our materials can provide. I like to think that I teach composition so that students can be brought into the world of studying English (comp is an English course), literature, and critical writing at a first-tier university level. In my limited understanding of how comp is taught at Purdue, students are far less challenged than they are at other similarly ranked universities. To digress, Purdue has one of the best engineering programs, and several of my students from last semester are engineering majors--so I can only imagine that their standards of academic study and their notions of the university dropped drastically after taking 106. I believe that we teach composition because it is as important as any class (and many classes at Purdue are highly complex, difficult, and challenging); I also believe that the highest level of the study of literature and writing is still an important part of the college curriculum. Perhaps coming from an older generation, I feel that the study of literature and writing is a pillar of a university education, and that any college education would be impoverished without a deeper understanding of literature and writing. Comp should be taught to not only improve students' grammar and understanding of the difference between appeals to logic and emotion; comp should be taught so that students could be exposed to great books and learn, from thinking about these texts critically, how to take their intellectual and composition abilities to a more sophisticated place.