Stephanie and Valerie Naratil/YH

Teaching students to write at Yale demands that they first learn to read.

A few days ago, I tried to begin this essay with an informational buildup that provided real rhetorical kairos—occasion, constraint on my prose. That introduction had all of old Treebeard’s shambling towards Mordor, but none of his charming, quaking voice. I guess I’m no forest spirit; much more impish truth be told, I dive right in with Peeves’s laugh. I wish I were an ancient; ancients are big, smart, or strong; people listen to ancients, never to a troublemaker. But if that’s my fate, genes, and blood, I’ll do it best I can—start a few fires in Hogwarts Castle. But to burn down I’ve got to light up, and all I need for now is a phrase—“writing across the curriculum,” a term in the appendix of the 2003 report of the Committee on Yale College Education, which revised the University’s basic requirements for the bachelor’s degree. The phrase’s placement in the appendix of the report suggests how it functions at Yale, as something of a secret message operating in the backstage of the backstage of the undergraduate experience; behind the courses, ensconced in the reports that inform the reports that set the standards for teaching at Yale. An example: Linda Peterson, Professor of English and former teacher of “Daily Themes,” Yale’s renowned nonfiction prose course, submitted a paper to the 2003 Committee, “Writing Across the Curriculum and/in the Freshman English Program,” that suggested writing courses might be most useful to Yale as a way “to teach students how to recognize and use central conventions of writing in the disciplines by applying techniques of rhetorical analysis.”

The phase is not Peterson’s term alone. Obscure journals such as College English and Liberal Education have discussed its precise meaning since the mid-’80s, and universities from Penn State to MIT have dedicated Offices of Writing Across the Curriculum. But my project begins and ends with the student, with the personal experience of the college course. So another example, this one more everyday, one that a couple hundred Yalies have shared: Students who enroll in “Principles of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior,” semester two of the introductory biology sequence, must write a 15-to-20-page paper at the end of term. A 15-to-20-page paper that discusses 10 recent scientific articles. A 15-to-20-page paper in addition to watching those long lectures, reading that big textbook, and taking those ugly tests. That is to say, more work than the average graduate seminar expects, than the average undergraduate seminar expects, than the average lecture at Yale or anywhere else expects. Of course, “average” means nothing really, so a more concrete point of comparison: The Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley describes the oral examination it puts to third-year doctoral students as a test of “the candidate’s mastery of the factual information and theoretical concepts absorbed through coursework and seminar research,” an opportunity to challenge old assumptions in a field by asking new questions of it. Now, to relate that graduate exam to the work in “Principles of Ecology”: “factual information” and “coursework” suggest lectures, textbook, and tests; “seminar research” and “theoretical concepts,” weekly recitation sections leading to the paper; and “mastery,” the paper itself.

Yes, the link is ridiculous. Graduate school is hard, harder than freshman ecology, but for reasons startlingly difficult to explain; workload per se fails to satisfy. Although every Ph.D. student must constantly read, write, and think about an always-growing pile of old and new books, articles, stories, tweets, etc., neither the pile’s magnitude nor its rate of increase makes much difference in distinguishing between the oral exam and the end-of-term ecology paper. Compared to a high school science course, “Principles” both begins with more to read and accumulates reading much more quickly, yet more advanced courses do not necessarily have more reading more quickly. Some have less, less quickly. Therefore, we can only spell out what we all know intuitively—that the “Principles” paper is not at all equivalent to an oral exam and that the above relation is a sham—by finding two entirely different reasons for why the two piles grow not directly related to size or its derivative.

Searching for those reasons brings us back to Professor Peterson and back to writing—“across the curriculum.” Peterson not only knows that undergraduate and graduate or professional academic writing are different, but also wants to strengthen the walls separating the two. “The concept of convention…is crucial to the student’s success in undergraduate courses,” she writes in her report, which urges professors to consider students “apprentices” who learn how to write in much the same way a Cumberlands craftsman might learn how to turn a wooden bowl on a lathe. The association is frightening not only because it transforms the University into a guild licensing greenhorns and journeymen as distinct from artisans and masters but also because it reduces writing to a toolbox of cold, metallic rhetorical instruments—hammers and nails, but no material to put together. Well, some material, namely exemplary writing taught precisely in that way, as examples of the use of the tools, not as finished objects with colors, and textures, and shapes. The focus is on craftsmanship and not design, so writers under the Peterson model—all undergraduates if she had her way—would have their first college writing experience be one akin to dye-stamping a fork and not drafting a blueprint for a whistling teapot.

Design and craftsmanship do exist on a continuum of sorts; both involve a kind of artful risk, but the Peterson model tries to eliminate as much of this risk as possible by emphasizing the reproducibility of certain elements of written English in all writing, for all people, at all times, in all places. On the one hand, this project capitalizes and consumerizes the written essay of any sort; on the other, it runs against the opinion, held by multiple teachers and writers at Yale and elsewhere, that learning to write better means finding “the writing that speaks to you, and really [going] to school with it: [analyzing] your response to it, [seeing] what makes it work for you, then [trying] to develop the same characteristics in your writing.” (I thank Professor of Comparative Literature Haun Saussy for that quote, and for providing the inspiration for what follows.) The anonymous individual is what matters: Each student brings to his or her education such a particular life history that no teacher can reasonably expect that any given piece of writing or any particular rhetorical mode or convention will incite a student to read more related writing. Peterson’s suggestion that certain styles must be learned and should be learned because of an inherent value assumes a certain universal truth of writing that is entirely insupportable in an increasingly multicultural world.

Yet again, I overblow to give myself an opportunity to retreat (but the tide of my critique still rises!). A few elements of the English language are certainly useful to know in almost every situation—for example, grammar, which is not style—a distinction nonfiction writer and Yale English professor Anne Fadiman helped me to remember. But style, which can be minimalist, maximalist, rigorously objective, or luxuriously subjective—thanks again to Fadiman for those categories—is a deeply personal culmination, a phenomenon of collected experience and the choices it prejudices. This definition has its imprecisions, but it also allows for the suggestion that the most informed decisions about style, and just perhaps the luckiest of all turns of phrase, come about through the collection of the greatest possible variety of exploits. Insofar as it is an academic institution (one among many roles), the University has the capacity to offer students near-infinite knowledge of reading, writing, and thinking over all sorts of disciplines. Each of those disciplines has a received set of traditional reading written traditionally, and some have a smaller or larger collection of important, consciously extra-traditional, a-traditional, or anti-traditional work. Peterson knows this. All academics know this. Every student who graduates from Yale knows this. What only Peterson says, however, (largely without knowing it) is that a university’s decision to teach writing from universalized rhetorical principles secures students’ unconscious participation in a system of writing “in the disciplines,” according to a series of expectations “agreed on by an academic community,” not across or between them.

Most Yale students already know how to write in a discipline—a very esoteric discipline, in fact. Successful application to Yale implicitly demands that talented high school seniors produce an overzealous summary of their high school activities that often verges on the dishonest, write a short essay that most usually portrays an incidental anecdote as a formative memory, and score highly on a standardized test designed and written by a community of academics. Self-teaching to the test or the discipline is a skill most students at prestigious universities have before they arrive on campus, so Peterson’s ideal writing program—and, to a certain extent, Yale’s implementation of her recommendations through the requirement that each undergraduate take two courses specifically designed to “give attention to the development of writing skills”—accomplishes little more than gifting talented students tools with which to accomplish faster and more unconsciously tasks they already complete without much thought. And that is no gift. Nor is it a challenge. Nor is it a way through which the mind expands to find a true independence—a stated goal of a Yale College education, according to University President Richard Levin’s 2007 address to the freshman class. Under the current writing regime, Levin’s exhorting every student to take classes in as wide as possible a range of departments reduces to a command to dot many differently colored points of knowledge upon one’s mind before stepping back to look at the picture.

Only artist George Seurat had such specific skill, and he did not develop it by writing. The comprehensive color theory animating each point in 1884’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte” is optics rewritten in oil, and before he began painting Seurat had become well-acquainted with the work of chemists and physicists working in the field in both France and the United States. His interest in color led him to read far outside the aesthetic canon before returning home to change the course of modern art. “Writing” in his discipline came only after reading strangely, unexpectedly, broadly to the point of foolishness—and yet to miraculous effect. Reading so well is challenging; it requires the sangfroid to pursue one’s interests so far that what one learns might no longer look at all like what one wants to learn. Probably few are born with such courage; cultivating it demands innovative instruction and enthusiastic encouragement. Some teachers, mostly in the various humanities, do encourage students to read more writers in pursuit of themselves writing more ambitiously and more precisely. Sterling Professor of English, David Bromwich suggests instructors might encourage broad reading even more vigorously. But professors teaching upper division humanities courses preach to the choir; their students are already, perhaps inherently, voracious readers. The question is how to expand the humanistic emphasis on reading into the disciplines where it is not already prevalent, how to get humanists reading science and get scientists reading poetry—really, how to get everyone reading everything in accordance with the most spacious notion of his or her interest.

Some change in class structure is essential. The end-of-term paper in “Principles of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior” is only an insufficient beginning. The requirement that students memorize textbook information takes time away from the paper; the fact that it must address a topic in the ecology of the Galapagos Islands limits the range of allowed interests. Certainly, as Senior Lecturer in the Humanities, Jane Levin points out, a tension will always exist between the need for a course to contain real content and the need for its students to find real intellectual freedom. But an emphasis on enterprising reading—born of student interests and leading to a written product—can yield a great lake of informational knowledge. That knowledge may not encompass an entire discipline, but repeated attempts will bring in more and more directly relevant facts. And because continued, fully ecumenical reading about ecology can start with statistical evolutionary biology and end with Wordsworth, such breath has the chance to inject into even the most constrained, “objective” academic conversations, new ways of writing—and unforeseen creativity in research.

The outlines of a theoretical ideal begin to emerge. Midterms, total recall, term identification all disappear. Content lectures remain, but textbooks do not. Rather, the professional literature and primary sources of a field is the assignment for the first lecture and the last—no matter how advanced the course. Lectures are moments to place small-born articles within their proper constellation of concepts. And instructors assume that while students may not read every page earmarked on the syllabus, they will most certainly read beyond it when even the shortest moment of a class meeting—a joke to begin, a metaphor to end—counters their intuition or horrifies their imagination. Recitation sections become short tutorials during which students receive advice on unknown books, far-away articles. So long as instructors help students maintain boundaries on their topics but not in background reading, written reports will be of manageable size but bristling style.

This kind of intellectual craftsmanship is indeed risky; some papers will fail, but with 36 courses in a Yale College education, some will succeed as well. And that success will be exceptional by virtue of its literariness, by virtue of the choices students can make in the style in which they write, in the ideas they use to direct their topical investigations. Professor of Comparative Literature, Katie Trumpener suggested to me that style and language will always be some kind of hybrid between languages and cultures. The same can be accomplished between disciplines in the simplest sense, through demanding a passion in reading stemming from even incidental interests that eventually leads to the written word. The full clarity of any ideas will surely emerge in that writing down. Only if the penning comes after the most disoriented and yet directed reading, however, will the writer have enough experience with competing styles, enough connections between competing ideas, to find within his own thoughts a sparkling synthesis, a contribution of purchase to colleagues but of interest to friends. There is a humanism about even the most scientific disciplines, a science about the most humanistic. Teaching and learning to read, not write, seems the only way to sturdy the connections between them, to liberate the one within the other.

Cover design by Emma Ledbetter.