Essay Topic- Expressive Collaboration in First-Year Composition

 I underlined my thesis for the argument, which is sort of cobbled together from my blog's arguments on expressive writing. Don't worry, most of the recycled concepts are about a third of the paper right now, and are going to be revised greatly. 2/3 of the essay are basically expansions and additions to some of the ideas that I pushed forward for most of the semester and in my writing philosophy.

First-year writing is one of the most polarizing English subjects for students everywhere: Either you hate it or you love it. That, or you need it for a credit fulfillment of some sort. The freshman English classes that I have mainly experienced, however, tend to be more of an assembly line series of classes where assistant teachers just go around and give people this distant sort of teaching advice that does not really give the teacher a chance to really connect with the students’ writing in any way. A common trend also boils down where students are taught basic essay and rhetoric principles without understanding how they apply to the type of writing that students want to do, which to me doesn’t make the students any closer to mastering rhetoric or any part of their writing in general. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the bare bones process of most FYC classes instead makes them mechanically write down important sounding essays that they think that teachers and scholars will want to read or to hear. There needs to be more of a collaborative relationship where the teacher can teach students to expressively use rhetoric and essay writing while also learning something from the students. I am not saying that first-year composition should have more teachers be softer with their students and be more maternal towards them. I am instead arguing that Freshman English classes would greatly improve if the teaching of expressive writing through collaborative methods were more widely expanded in the scholarly world of rhetoric. That way, composition students could rely less on sounding important and just write the kind of composed arguments that said students, their peers, and their teachers would all want to read. All the while, students could maintain a persuasive professionalism due to the established collaborative and expressive respect between teachers and students.
    I understand that some first-year writing courses adopt a sort of collaborative or Socratic method of teaching. Indiana University Bloomington’s first-year writing program includes a good example of post-process writing where the student’s voice as a writer is emphasized. Yet many freshman composition courses, like the ones I took when I was enrolled in Texas Tech in 2010, tend to have a part-time instructor who give basic lessons on composition while groups of graduate students grade papers submitted online. While basic lessons on composition do usually open students’ eyes to the concepts and procedures of composition writing in general, they don’t really encourage students to develop a unique writing voice that can appeal to masses beyond the classroom. By collaborating with a student or diving in to understand a student, even a part-time instructor can get better work out of students by meeting with them to discuss strengths and weaknesses of each student’s writing style. Each student has a strong suit related to general writing that he or she should learn along with the teacher, which I feel can be best strengthened with the collaborative-expressive writing process that I have coined and invented for the sake of my argument. For the remainder of the article, ergo, I will further discuss how my invented process can tie with improving audience understanding and writing voices. During this discussion, I will try to take into consideration the benefits that expressive writing has over any other established process theories of writing, including post-process writing. I will subsequently discuss how teachers can establish consensus with general groups of composition students and their growing underlives and vice versa, while taking note of writings by scholars like Mina Shaugnessy.