Blog 4: Looking Toward the First Paper

For this blog entry, I’m going to talk less about my own experience with writing and more about the process of teaching writing. My own experience writing is not tremendously helpful: I went to a college prep school where a true collegiate style of writing was ground into my head on a daily basis. (Some high school students are told that they’re being taught a collegiate style of writing when in fact they are not being so taught.) So I knew what to do when I went to college and was able to focus on grappling with the material, which is what most professors want. However, I’ve since learned that you if you aren’t terribly sure how college writing works, then it can be very daunting. The anxiety can then keep one from truly grappling with the material. I think that many students are at the mercy of how well their high school prepared them; in some cases, one can overcome a high-school-based deficiency with a rigorous college writing class, but that is not always the case.

 

To make matters more difficult, it is much harder to teach philosophical writing than it is to teach general composition. I know, as I teach both composition and philosophy. This difficulty is in large part because (a) philosophers are curmudgeonly types and reject the idea of a single method or mould into which everyone can be expected to fit and (b) the type of writing that is rewarding in philosophy cannot happen if one tries to fit a mould. Thus, I can offer examples and templates and possible topics and questions and themes in composition and literature, but it does not work in philosophy. Further reasons for this are the fact that philosophy (c), unlike composition, requires you to encounter many philosophers and talk about them, and this leaves little room for talking about writing in detail and (d), unlike a literature course, there is not the ability to do lots of research and gather up supporting material as a means of spelling out and expanding your claim, which in turn adds length to your paper. (Most secondary sources in philosophy are far too difficult for undergraduates, especially at the introductory level). As a result, you’re really forced to rely upon your own thoughts and instincts and sense of things. Philosophically speaking, of course, this is as it should be.

 

However, I don’t want you to be fully unprepared, and for this reason I give you all these reading questions and blogs. It might have seemed odd that I wasn’t worried about correctness; I just wanted you writing. (Of course, this might have seemed perfectly natural.) One aim of that is to get you comfortable with writing and thinking in a new – philosophical – way so that you’re not completely unprepared to write a philosophical essay (one in which you are thinking in every sentence and the thoughts are all coming from you). But what you write should be a true expression of your mind at this point in your life. My hope is that finding such an expression will be worth the effort.