A week or so before the start of fall semester classes, I shared the following letter with students who’d enrolled in my first-year writing class. I’d learned over the years that many students feel less than enthusiastic about their writing abilities and are underwhelmed by the thought of taking yet another writing course. In the letter, I attempt to establish a welcoming tone by discussing the revision-based nature of my pedagogy and sharing a bit of my own writing history.
Welcome to College Writing!
Hello, all,
Welcome to College Writing! Hard to believe we’re nearing the end of summer break! I’m feeling a by-now familiar mixture of sadness and excitement – sadness to say goodbye to the summer, and excitement at the thought of getting to know and work with each of you on writing for the next few months.
I’m going into my thirteenth year of teaching college writing, but I became fascinated with writing as an undergraduate at Bowling Green State University. Like many of my students admit to feeling on the first day of class (you may even find yourself feeling this way, too), I came into my first-year writing course feeling uneasy and anxious. I’d written well enough in high school, and I loved to read (at that time, I was a huge fan of Star Wars novels and Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series). But, as I scanned our course textbooks and the syllabus after the first day of class, I felt underprepared for and overwhelmed by the kinds of reading and writing my instructor had planned. I’d had hopes of auditioning for admittance into the jazz guitar performance major after my first year; what did I need all this writing for, I wondered?
My writing instructor that first semester opened the door for me to discover just how much I actually did need writing. She introduced me to the drafting process and helped me see that writing was revising, that no writing had to be perfect on the page, and that everyone (even Stephen King) writes badly at first. After reading a short story I’d written in high school, she encouraged me to try a creative writing course. By sophomore year, I had enrolled in the creative writing major; by senior year, I was applying to graduate writing programs. I would earn my Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing three years later. Now, thirteen years after that, I find myself writing you the words my teacher shared with me and my peers on the first day of class:
You belong here.
We’ll work on four projects this semester. For each, you’ll have chances to use writing to explore your own ideas; develop, draft, and revise your papers; and respond to some of your classmates’ drafts. We’ll discuss APA citation, paper formatting, and grammar, but mostly I’ll try to help you understand that these and other rules for writing change depending on what you’re trying to accomplish through writing and who you’re writing to. I aim to meet you where you are and help you to grow your writing skills and confidence.
Our course syllabus and schedule are attached to this email as PDFs. Please let me know if you experience any problems when trying to access these files. I’ll also soon be posting the syllabus to our course Canvas site. I’ve kept our Canvas course unpublished because I’m still working on the pages. I hope to have Canvas open to you before this weekend, so that you can
- familiarize yourself with the site,
- review the syllabus and other course documents,
- share a brief intro with the class in the Open Discussion space, and
- if possible, order our course textbook, Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs’s Writing About Writing,5th edition (Bedford / St. Martin’s Press, 2023).
You’re not required to complete the above before coming to class next week. I encourage you to take some time to review the attached course syllabus and, if you can, share a bit about yourself in the Open Discussion once I publish our course Canvas site. But don’t stress if you’re unable to do so. We’ll spend time on the first day getting to know each other and learning a bit about the course.
In the meantime, please contact me via email with any questions or concerns. I’m looking forward to hearing from you and to meeting you in person when we begin class next week.
Sincerely,
Patrick
Patrick Faller 