Here.
I'm sitting here in The Grape office, trying to imagine what it would be like if I could get copy editing done before 4:30 AM. But, why waste time on pipe dreams?
Glenn Greenwald uses Brian Williams as a punching bag in a long but valuable post on the disgusting media blackout on The New York Times's media/military complex (see here).
A study conducted by my Teaching and Tutoring Writing class on faculty attitudes toward the writing center and student writing showed some interesting results. For example, 24% of professors who believe that their disciplines' writing conventions do not differ that much or at all from other disciplines also believe that majors write better than non-majors. Apparently, these profs. can't put it together that the reason major's might write better is that they understand the conventions of the discipline.
It's like profs. in their ghettoized discourses don't get that the expectations for writing differ quite a bit for students. They can even believe in pretty strong evidence (24% of them, anyway) and still not get the fundimental truth about academia: there is no one discipline.
Furthermore, one-third of these professors work in social science (where conventions differ quite a bit, and about 20% work in the natural sciences (where conventions really differ. A little more than a third work in the con (music history and music theory, where conventions also differ pretty substantially from the rest of the world.
Also, professors seem to get that someone needs to teach people how to write, but they also don't think they should be the one's to do it. So the burden falls to, well, no one. We at the writing center deal with ESL and struggling writers the best we can, but we simply aren't trained to do this kind of work. Instead, we act like a band-aid, getting kids who don't know what their prof. wants (and we don't really know what the prof. wants, as their prompts are unclear and unhelpful); meanwhile, the system goes on, expecting students to pick up writing by osmosis.
Profs. in the con seem to get it better than their college counterparts, probably because they deal with students who don't expect to write (connies and esl kids).
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