Nancy Sommers begins to report on Harvard’s five-year study of the writing development of a class of students from their freshman through senior years. I have heard her discuss this research and process several times at CCCCs and NCTE. They have collected over 600 pounds of student documents for 400 students and continue to analyze document the significance of their findings.
Their overarching research question is “Do students leave college stronger writers than when they entered?”
Sommers explains that in college, “students are asked to write more than plot summary, more than a cut-and-paste presentation of secondary sources. Rather they are instructed in the language of analysis, argument, and counter-argument and are urged, in our responses to their drafts to ‘analyze more’ and to ‘go deeper into their sources’” (152).
She uses the metaphor of students entering the university seeking the secret handshakes and esoteric codes and passwords practiced in the writing of their disciplines only to find that as they move across the curriculum those handshakes, codes, and passwords change—writing continues to be a mystery for many students for much of their academic experience. Student writing continues to develop throughout their studies.
Sommers admits that their study offers “two paradoxes of writing development: (1) writing development is not always visible on the page—students may be able to articulate standards of good writing before being able to put them into practice; (2) writing development involves steps both forward and backward, gains and losses, and requires some amount of ‘bad’ writing while new skills are practiced” (154)
Sommers study does admit that what students learn in their first-year writing classes are not adequate to prepare them for later college writing: “Such a foundation [first year writing classes] is inadequate for the more and deeper research assignments they [students] are asked to complete in their junior and senior years. Why some students prosper within their disciplines, while others stall, is one of the perplexing questions we explored, and a question that is intimately connected to issues of audience. Students who prosper as writers, we observed, cultivate a desire to enter disciplinary debates and to find their place in an academic exchange, with something to gain and much to give” (155-56).
To illustrate the necessity of students involving themselves significantly into discipline conversations, Sommers chronicles the experience of one student, Luisa from her freshman year which Luisa calls herself the “queen of the B minus” (156) through her senior year’s 75-page original political science research paper. Sommers explains: “if Luisa is to engage others in the arguments that matter to her, she needs to explain her logic by employing the methods and conventions of the disciplinary communities she enters. . . . She needs to learn their language and use their methods and approaches, not just her own idiosyncratic frame of reference. To reach an audience of political scientists, she needs to write like one—testing theories and hypotheses, synthesizing large bodies of information, and anticipating and refuting counterarguments” (157).
Luisa learns to achieve this success through “practice, repetition, and instruction” (157). And Sommers observes that Luisa “succeeds not by writing out of expertise but by writing into expertise” (157).
The principle of gaining knowledge and expertise comes throughout students’ university experience: “The critical role of expertise and knowledge play in preparing students to address an audience helps to account for may patterns we observed over four years. Students do not simply struggle with audience at the beginning of their college careers: they struggle with it whenever they find themselves as novices, unfamiliar with the ideas and methods of a particular discipline or subject matter. Expertise—or more accurately, the lack of it—also helps explain why students who never pursue one subject or one discipline in depth have more difficulty engaging readers” (158).
“Every time students read new texts, enter new debates, or practice new sets of disciplinary conventions, they must in effect, learn how to address a new audience. . . . If students learn to write to and for an audience, it happens because of a confluence of desires: an institution desires its students to receive explicit, sustained, and incremental instruction in thinking and writing; and students desire to see their writing not as an isolated exercise but as part of an ongoing academic exchange” (159).
Sommers explains that a single element influencing students writing development is never sufficient for students to succeed as writers—many elements must mesh: “Any single element necessary for development is never sufficient for students to succeed as college writers. For instance, close reading is necessary but not sufficient in itself for making arguable claims. Learning to question sources and pose counterarguments are necessary to establish a place in an academic debate but not sufficient to engage readers if a student lacks expertise in the subject matter or lacks expertise with the disciplinary methods of engagement. And learning to ask questions that matter to a student is necessary but not sufficient, especially if these questions matter only to the student and not to a community of readers” (161).
Sommers concludes with a reference to Luisa: “It is through writing that Luisa learns to shape her personal interests into public ones, moving into the wider world as a thoughtful and educated citizen” (162).
Sommers, Nancy. "The Call of Research: A Longitudinal View of Writing Development." College Composition and Communication 60.1 (2008): 152-164.
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