What is Graduate Writing? Guest Writer: John Leininger

Students in Dr. Nicole Pfannenstiel’s summer Games and Writing class crafted blog posts exploring play theory. Over the next several weeks, we will share their theory posts in this space to offer a variety of perspectives on play, games, and writing, written by current graduate students in the MA and M.Ed. English programs.


What is Graduate Writing? 

By: John Leininger

 “Writing is boring.” As a high school English teacher, I hear this particular opinion quite often, and not just from my students; many adults also feel that writing is just not fun. I believe that this is simply because they are, by no fault of their own, still stuck in a grade school mindset of writing that can seem redundant, isolated, and anticlimactic: redundant because it simply restates old information in a new way; isolated because it is only useful in the immediate context (i.e. classroom, grade, checkbox); and anticlimactic because it is work that doesn’t change anything. However, when practiced and explored into the graduate level, writing can, and should become much more – it should become exploratory, emergent, and dynamic; exploratory as it is used to investigate new ideas; emergent as it is directed into real-life contexts for others to see; and dynamic as it changes and adapts with the context and aids the writer in understanding their own ideas.  

Consider, for a moment, a writing assignment that asks a writer to talk about the Roman Empire. A writer could easily just look up a bunch of information about the Romans and put it down on paper – job done. This would, of course, seem a little redundant. There is no reason why a reader would choose to read that paper over the original sources; it is all the same information. The Writing Program Administrators Council (WPAC), which oversees the post-secondary teaching of writing, recognizes this though, and says that college students should be taught to, “use composing and reading for inquiry, learning, critical thinking, and communicating,” not just the restating of information. So, if a writer instead uses their sources to come up with new ideas about the Roman Empire, and uses writing to present them, then writing has moved beyond redundant, it is now filled with new ideas that the writer can be proud of – it is exploratory.  

Even with a new idea, however, the essay will still feel isolated if it is not shared with others and discussed. Creating writing that fits into a real-world context and that will grab the attention of real-world audiences is a lot different than writing a grade school essay. The WPAC says that the college writer should learn to “integrate the writer’s ideas with those from appropriate sources.” So, to move beyond isolation, a new idea must be connected to existing ideas in a way that others can access and respond to. The writer will not just learn to understand their own idea, but also the ideas of others that might connect to or contradict it. As soon as they address other people’s ideas in connection with their own, their writing emerges within an active conversation and can be used by others. Suddenly, their work is emergent.  

But even the most emergent and exploratory essay will still feel anticlimactic if just dropped into the world and never looked at again. If, however, the author listens to what others are saying about their work, reviews their own ideas, and adapts both their paper and their own perspective to the conversation that is created, suddenly their work becomes dynamic, constantly changing, growing, and adapting, representing their own mind as it journeys through new ideas and perspectives. The WPAC calls this using writing as “a means to discover and reconsider ideas,” and it makes writing unique to the individual writer. It makes their writing valuable to them. When writing is exploratory, emergent, and dynamic, writing is no longer “boring,” because it is alive. 

Works Cited 

“WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition (3.0), Approved July 17, 2014.” WPA Council, Council of Writing Program Administrators, 18 July 2019, wpacouncil.org/aws/CWPA/pt/sd/news_article/243055/_PARENT/layout_details/false.  

 

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