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Marfcetafato commodity Richard Frye (seated> leads a New York University writing workshop
identified through the assessment test—
enroll in a special writing course, the one I
teach, which no one ever calls remedial
They write and rewrite every week and
attend a weekly half-hour tutorial session
with their instructor At least one-fourth of
t he freshmun class could benefit from such
a course, but because it is an intenBive-care
operation, it is limited to the neediest
Thosestudentswhodo prove most in need
of writing help are not a predictable lot
They are not all (or even mostly > black and
Hispanic students admitted on some sort of
affirmative-action discount pass They are
not all farm-bred aggies or ice-bound jocks
or digitally programmed engineers The
only safe generalization is that a significant
percentage are foreign-born students who
have not yet worked all the kinks out of a
tough new language. There are, in short, no
scapegoats among these students, no easily
isolated groups to muke one feel that writ
ing woes are limited The students are per
fectly bright, hard-working young people
from nice families and good schools, who
have earned their admission to a selective
university and will probably lead successful
lives. They just don’t write very well.
Do* »nd don't*: The main reason iH that
they were never taught to write well—and
that is not a blanket indictment of elemen
tary- and secondary-school teachers. Writ
ing takes time, and time is what teachers
don’t have. My students, 24 of them, write
erhaps three pages twice each week: a first
Iraft and a revision, both of which I readand
correct A typical high-school teacher who
assigned that much writing would be look
ing at more than 700 pages a week
Partly because of the time limitations,
high-school teaching often presents writing
in terms of rules and formulas, handy refer
enceslike t imetables designed toyield "cor
rect" answers Students have told me, for
instance, thut previous teachers instructed
them never to begin a sentence with "and”
or"but"and that they should write conclud
ing paragraphs that are virtually identical
to their introductory para
graphs. Such rules, at best,
may lead to decriminalized
prose, free from major gram
matical and stylistic trans
gressions. But (yes, buflthey
do not always have much to
do with good writing. In
fact, they may inhibit good
writing.
'Cmmm splice’: As a novice, I
often lack the authoritative
buzzwords that might cow a
student into submission.
Terms like "comma splice”
and "dangling participle”
tend to work because they
soundofficial.even ifthe stu
dent doesn’t know exactly
what they mean. At times,
however, I encounter gram
matically "legal” passages
that are so tortured, or
word choices so bizarre, that
my diagnostic vocabulary
fails me when the student
asks why I want him to
make a certain change.
What can I say—because it
sounds dumb? Because no one will know
what he’s trying to say? Because it reeks of
that special aroma found in student writ
ing? In effect, 1 end up relying on the plea of
the crafty suitor: trust me.
Students seem never to have been ex
posed to writing as an art form rather than
a science. They look for answers, not guid
ance in a process. If I tell a student, for
example, that it doesn’t bother me if he
starts a sentence with "but,” he may pro
test, then look confused, then shrug. The
Learning how to deliver the product: Williams working with student Damien Chin-On
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