The aim of English 503, How to Teach Writing (3 credits), is to prepare those who wish to apply for teaching assistantships and to train students for teaching possibilities elsewhere. This course is usually required for all students in the program, but those who are sure that they do not want to teach writing at Southampton or any other place may elect to substitute another graduate English course for English 503.

1. English 503 is offered every session and semester, whether as a scheduled course or as a tutorial. A student who enrolls in 503 is assigned to a full-time faculty member who is teaching English 101, 102, 103, 112, 151, 212, or 312. As part of taking English 503, the student is expected to attend the undergraduate English class regularly and to complete all the work required of the undergraduates. At the same time, the graduate student will receive a reading list and assignments prepared by the full-time faculty member. The student and faculty member will meet at least once a week to go over both the reading assignments and the practical work of the classroom. The student will be exposed to the process of preparing classes, grading papers, talking with students, and all the other facets of teaching. In addition to writing the same assignments required of the undergraduates, the student will also write papers arising from the classroom experience and from the assigned reading. At the discretion of the faculty member, the student may occasionally teach. In a session or semester where several students are taking English 503, the course may also require regular meetings, under faculty supervision, of all students enrolled in the course for the purpose of discussion.

2. Students who have completed 15 credits toward the MFA degree and who have taken English 503 may apply for teaching assistantships. All applications will be reviewed by the writing faculty. Teaching assistantships are awarded on a competitive basis, and there is no presumption that by applying a student will be accepted for an assistantship. The deadlines and procedures for application are published regularly by the Writing Program. Information concerning financial aid and teaching assistantships is available from the Humanities Office.

3. Students who are accepted for teaching assistantships may be assigned a course from among English 101, 102, 103, 112, 151, 212, or 312, or they may be assigned assistantship duties in a class taught by a full-time faculty member. Teaching assistants may also be assigned to tutorial roles in lieu of classroom teaching.

4. English 503 registration and assignments are coordinated by the program director of the M.F.A. in Writing. For additional information, please consult the Humanities Office, Fine Arts 9 (631)287-8420.

Reading List for English 503, How to Teach Writing

Since those taking English 503 may be called upon to teach or tutor in Southampton's required English program, this bibliography will concentrate on works about basic composition as taught in America.

Students may be amused to note that the huge publishing enterprise devoted to examining the production of good writing is characterized throughout by bad prose. All the traps that good writers should avoid--jargon, redundancy, illogicality, flabby syntax, pomposity of expression, and poverty of thought--are vividly on display in the academic screeds concerning this topic. Many of the works mentioned below would provide excellent counter-examples for any class concerned with the quality of written expression.

Bibliographies

Edward P. J. Corbett et al., The Writing Teacher's Source Book, 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, and Gary Tate, ed., Teaching Composition: Twelve Bibliographical Essays, 2nd ed. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987, will introduce the student to the relevant literature. The CCCC publishes annual bibliographies of work in writing instruction. See for instance Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe, eds., The CCCC Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press (this series now includes titles covering the years 1991 through 1995). For more recent publications and discussions of the subject, students may wish to consult the most prominent journals that address instruction in writing.

Journals

College English is the leading academic publication devoted to the subject. College Composition and Communication is also useful. Current and back issues of both should be available in any major college or university library.

Associations

The teaching of writing in America may fairly be viewed as a major industry, employing at the college level tens of thousands of individuals either as full-time or adjunct faculty. At the high-school level, hundreds of thousands are engaged in the task of instruction in English prose. Like any major trade group, teachers of writing have guilds and associations for the dissemination of information and for political lobbying. The National Council of Teachers of English, 1111 Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801, (217) 328-3870, holds annual conventions and other regular conferences, especially through its affiliate, The Conference on College Composition and Communication, referred to as the 4Cs. The NCTE is the chief trade group for the industry and also publishes numerous works concerned with composition. The Modern Language Association, 10 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003, (212) 475-9500, also publishes in the field of writing instruction. Those seeking full-time employment as college English teachers are usually subjected to this trade organization's annual Yuletide convention, which serves as a cattle-call for job applicants.

Handbooks and Guidebooks

Nowhere is the industrial nature of teaching English more colorfully on view than in the vast array of composition handbooks for use in the classroom. Remedial or freshman-level writing courses are required in most of America's colleges and universities, and each of the millions of students who annually enter the higher education system is routinely asked to purchase at least one of the hundreds of composition textbooks available. These are relatively cheap to produce, and with the complicity of the instructors who assign them, publishers can be assured of enough sales to reap excellent profits. Since texts are assigned and students have little choice in their selection, prices may be set high--$30, $40, or even $50 are usual prices for composition texts. Publishers and textbook authors avoid price competition from used or recycled texts by frequently issuing and requiring the purchase of new editions of established works, most of which differ from their earlier manifestations only in being more expensive. Sheridan Baker, The Practical Stylist, Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Publishing, 1997, is now in its eighth edition, and the venerable Harbrace College Handbook, San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1998, has seen thirteen incarnations. Students may look to either of these, or to any of their many counterparts, to observe the basic structure of the composition handbook: a section on basic grammar, a section on organizing ideas, a section on generating sentences and paragraphs, a section on revision, a section on producing the research paper.

Since most composition classes require reading assignments as well as writing, many handbooks incorporate sections of essays or short stories; see for instance Sheridan Baker, The Practical Stylist with Readings, 8th ed. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Publishing, 1997. Alternatively, students may be asked to buy a handbook and a separate anthology of fiction and non-fiction works. The mother of all such anthologies is The Norton Reader, ed. Linda Peterson. New York: Norton Publishing, 1997, now in its ninth edition. The Norton Reader, which comes in both expanded and contracted versions, has dozens of imitators, but the formula for all of them is identical: a handful of classic essays by the likes of Virginia Woolf and George Orwell mixed with short contemporary works--fiction or otherwise--meant to be thought-provoking (Does television induce violence? Should we clone our grandmothers?).

Handbooks and anthologies may be supplemented or replaced by workbooks that provide minimalist explanations of basic grammar and various exercises to test mastery of sentence structure and punctuation. Harbrace once again reigns supreme in this field: Larry G. Mapp, Harbrace College Workbook. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1997, is now in its thirteenth edition, and each edition has variant forms (Writing for the World of Work is designed for trade-school and business students).

For handbooks and workbooks, shorter is almost always better. Edward Corbett and Sheryl Finkle, The Little English Handbook. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1997, is the briefest and sanest of the lot, although each further edition makes the mistake of adding material. For workbooks, R. Kent Smith and Janet Goldstein, English Brushup. Marlton, NJ: Townsend Press, 1993, and Teresa F. Glazier, The Least You Should Know about English. 6th ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1997, are both sensible.

Real Rhetoric and Style Manuals

Handbooks for composition are sometimes called rhetorics, a misnomer leading students and teachers alike to believe that anyone who has learned to compose a grammatically correct and coherent set of paragraphs in contemporary English has somehow mastered the ancient art called rhetoric. Anyone interested in real rhetoric should turn to Edward Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, or to Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Real rhetoric, a complex and technical field of study, has more to offer the student of teaching than the bulk of contemporary works on composition theory.

Just as real rhetoric is beyond the capacities of most contemporary students and instructors of writing, so the majority of older texts on style and substance in composition assume a classically educated background that is generally no longer possessed by modern freshmen or their teachers, whether they be at Stanford or Suffolk Community College. Nonetheless, anyone interested in the historical and social milieu of what passes for good English writing in the modern world should be familiar with William Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style. 4th ed. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1999 (originally published in 1959), and William K. Zinsser, On Writing Well. 6th ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.

Writing students and their instructors often assume that in English composition there is a right way to spell words, punctuate sentences, and order syntax. This delusion can be quickly dispelled by reference to the conflicting recommendations of various style books and scholarly grammars. Compare, for instance, The Chicago Manual of Style. 14th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993 (the text most widely used by academic publishers themselves), with The New York Times Style Book. New York: Random House, 1997. Or simply compare the conventions of English usage employed in The New Yorker magazine with those in Wired. The conventions of English composition are made by art, not science. Students, however, will want the certainty of the college handbook. Instructors, on the other hand, should know that certainty in matters of English grammar and orthography are elusive. The definitive description of English grammar in all its confusion is Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, et al., A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. White Plains, NY: Longman, 1985.

Theory

The last twenty years have seen an explosion of publications dealing with the theory of composition; that is, works that explore the social, sexual, biological, political, psychological, or economic imperatives lurking behind the act of writing; works that proclaim the true methods of instruction in English; works that assess the best modes of assessing written work; and so forth. A brief guide to this field can be found in Gary Tate and Erika Lindemann, eds., An Introduction to Composition Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Students should be aware that some of these publications have achieved the status of classics in the field: Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975, and the same author's Writing with Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981, betray their reductive and simple-minded approach in their titles. Despite its name, do not be surprised if the teaching methods described in Art Young, ed., Programs That Work: Models and Methods for Writing Across the Curriculum. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton Cook Publications, 1989, do not produce the desired result with real groups of human beings. Mina P. Shaughnessy, Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, is less dogmatic than most such texts and consequently more worthwhile. Many of the authors assembled by Edward White, ed., Assessment of Writing. New York: Modern Language Association, 1996, are leaders in the field of composition theory. The student may assess by reading them the validity of the field itself.

The novice interested in teaching others how to write may, after encountering real students and instructors with their inexhaustible array of individual quirks, talents, phobias, eccentricities, insights, obsessions, and skills, wonder how or why scholars produce books hoping to reduce any aspect of this diversity to the dogmatism of a method or a theory. And yet they do: John C. Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrated Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossy-Bass, 1996 (students should note that the term critical thinking is invariably a warning sign that neither element of the expression will be present in the prose); David A. Foster, A Primer for Writing Teachers: Theories, Theorists, Issues, Problems. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton Cook Publications, 1992; Gabriele L. Rico, Writing the Natural Way: Using Right-Brain Techniques to Release Your Expressive Powers. New York: Putnam, 1983.

After the longueurs of theory, the student will turn with relief to Christopher Edgar and Ron Padgett, Old Faithful: Eighteen Writers Present Their Favorite Writing Assignments, New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1995. Most writing teachers soon learn to ask colleagues for practical advice and gradually assemble an approach that best fits them and the particular students they must instruct. Guides that recognize the uniqueness of each class and the mental flexibility requisite for any teacher of composition are rare and always to be welcomed.

A number of recent publications combine theory, polemic, and autobiography in an attempt to understand the teaching of writing. W. Ross Winterowd, The English Department: A Personal and Institutional History. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998, explores the growing divide between teachers of literature ("padrones") and teachers of composition ("peons") and recommends "abolishing the distinction between creative writing and composition" in favor of a utopian future where teachers of literature and teachers of composition will stand as equals on the even playing field of rhetoric. The book is scholarly if starry-eyed. Jane Tompkins, A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1997, catalogues, in the form of a memoir, virtually every mistake that the composition instructor can make. John Sutherland's review of these two books, The Peon and the Program, Times Literary Supplement, September 4, 1998, p. 13, is instructive not only about the works themselves but about the teaching of composition in general.

The student is reminded that all academic work, including bibiographies, comes with a bias. The bias of this bibliography will be easier to assess by inspecting a publication of its author, Robert Pattison, On Literacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.