Andrea Lunsford was recruited to the English department last year as a world-class authority in writing, writing instruction and language communication theory. She has reorganized Writing and Critical Thinking as the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, and next fall she will launch the Stanford Center for Writing, Rhetoric and Technology. Lunsford encourages students to use multimedia presentation tools and says her favorite classrooms are designed around clusters of computers, where students can roll their chairs up to a central conference table to comment on one another's work.
Stanford: How are today's freshmen faring as writers?
Lunsford: You know, in the 1880s Harvard did a study of first-year-student writing and put 3,000 papers in the Harvard archives to attest to the illiteracy of American boys. Those papers are still there, and I've looked at them. What they say to me is that they're writing like 16- and 17-year-old kids. The myth that writing development is perfected by the age of 14 or 16 is very persistent in this country, but it's a myth because many people don't fully mature as writers until they're in their 40s and 50s.
What are your expectations, then, of 17- and 18-year-olds in your classes?
Our courses are writing courses, so they're productive, as opposed to solely interpretive. And that means the focus is always squarely on the students' writing and their growing maturation as writers. The college years are really crucial to writing development, which results from good instruction and from intensive response from both a knowledgeable adult and peers. Thus, every student who comes here can benefit from instruction in writing that is very time-intensive. There's no way to lecture about writing, although lecturing may give you ideas or be interesting and fun. The way to improve writing is to write with a kind of a guide, and that's what the teacher becomes -- a mentor, a more experienced stylist, a more experienced thinker.
What's the most striking change you've seen in freshmen over the past decade?
Students are not reading as much in the way of traditional texts, but they are reading more in the way of nontraditional texts. With the rise of newspapers and their narrow columns of print, sentences and paragraphs got shorter, and now the Internet invites a reader, much more than a print book does, to skip around, to click and go to other links. And perhaps because of that, it seems to me that students are often listening at random. They dip in and dip out, and if I ask them to take notes, their notes look very different from the notes I would take. I'm not a neurobiologist, but I'm wondering if we're changing the way we process information. And that's what makes the field of writing so exciting -- that those are the kinds of questions we're asking today.
