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Tough new writing requirement raises bar for class of 2005

By Hope Green

Utopias and Dystopias. Prometheus and the Limits of Science. The Law in Literature. The courses sound like a slate of electives for upperclassmen, but in fact they're just 3 of 70 intriguing seminar sections offered to freshmen through the new College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program.

As before, students from all BU schools and colleges will come to CAS to complete their freshman composition requirement, but starting this fall they can choose from an array of challenging theme-based seminars.

Michael Prince. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

"Here is a huge university offering a small writing-intensive seminar to all of its freshmen," says Michael Prince, CAS associate professor of English and assistant dean and director of the writing program. "This is just another example -- along with our outstanding Core Curriculum -- of BU's commitment to undergraduate education."

The seminar format is the foundation of a tough new student writing requirement at BU. Students enrolled in CAS must now take two semesters of writing seminars, and according to Prince, it is likely that other schools and colleges will add the same regimen.

To determine an appropriate course level, all BU freshmen must now take a test known as the Boston University Writing Assessment (BUWA). Test takers have 50 minutes to read a two-page essay and write a critical response. A majority of fresh-men are expected to qualify for WR100, the first writing seminar, then move on to WR150, Writing and Research, in the spring.

Other courses, including two levels of ESL instruction, are reserved for those whose BUWA scores demonstrate a need for intensive preliminary work. In a small percentage of cases, Prince says, students might score high enough to place directly into WR150.

Students in the Core Curriculum, who already meet in small writing-intensive seminars, will satisfy the first semester of the writing requirement by completing the first-year humanities sequence. Core Curriculum students who complete either the humanities or the social sciences sequence in their second year will satisfy the WR150 requirement.

In the next few years, CAS faculty will teach an increasing number of the writing seminars. "These seminars offer a great opportunity for faculty and entering students to work closely together," Prince says, "giving freshmen a preview of future work in departmental majors."

Dennis Berkey, University provost and dean of Arts and Sciences, says he likes the revised writing program because "it is based on a rigorous framework of developmental goals and experiences in writing, engages students with good literature, employs a competent assessment of students' writing abilities, and provides good support in the form of writing tutors and other programs of the new Writing Center."

The center, at 730 Commonwealth Ave., opened a year ago as a headquarters for tutoring and program development. Starting this fall it is open for one-on-one tutoring for the more than 3,000 students enrolled in writing courses.

In the past, writing teachers used a traditional composition textbook or reader, but the new format targets particular interests. One section listed in the program catalog, for instance, is entitled Warfare and the Literary Imagination and looks at works such as Homer's Iliad and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. By contrast, Great Essays in Science has Darwin, Freud, and Silent Spring author Rachel Carson on the syllabus.

"Our philosophy is that these courses should be based on substantial primary readings, and by the end of each course students should have gained knowledge of some topic that interests them and might be relevant to their future studies."

The sections vary by discipline, but all are based on the credo that good writing follows from reading the best writers. Every discipline has its literature, Prince explains; what matters is that the literature has intellectual and aesthetic merit. This goes hand in hand with another of the writing program's guiding principles: writing and speaking inform one another. Small class size will encourage teachers and students to focus particular attention on effective speaking and recitation of readings.

"Elocution is an art we have lost both in public and in teaching," Prince says, "but I share President Westling's view that it's very important to teach students to articulate their ideas correctly and forcefully."

A 10-member faculty committtee appointed by Berkey devised the new writing program, which was approved by the CAS faculty in November 1999. This move followed years of widespread concern, at BU and elsewhere, over the decline of student writing. Previously about 25 to 30 percent of any entering class typically satisfied the one-semester writing requirement through SAT or other standardized test results. Yet when the University began to administer the BUWA last summer, says Prince, the results confirmed the suspicion that there was little correlation between those test scores and actual writing ability.

Meanwhile there was much anecdotal evidence that poor reading and writing skills were hindering students' ability to synthesize college material. Katherine O'Connor, CAS professor of modern foreign languages and literatures and director of BU's Humanities Foundation, says she observes problems with student writing even in her upper-level Russian literature courses.

"I think the new focus on writing is a good and necessary idea," she says. "I've had so many papers come in where the style, the expression, the clarity, the comprehensibility, and everything about the writing is so problematic that I find myself guessing at what the content is."

The writing seminar program, Prince says, provides the foundation for all of the challenges students will face in reading, writing, and speaking over their college careers. Skills developed during the freshman experience will be reinforced and further developed in subsequent coursework.

"Our hope," says Prince, "is that every student graduating from Boston University will be truly literate -- able to speak effectively in public, read the most challenging works with comprehension and critical independence, and write prose that is clear and convincing."

7 September 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations