Ralph L. Wahlstrom
Director of The Writing Program
Buffalo State - SUNY
(716) 878-4309
wahlstrl@buffalostate.edu
 
 

  a musical summary

Being asked to teach advanced composition is a mixed blessing. On one hand it is an opportunity to bring new ways of writing and thinking about writing to students. On the other hand, it can be difficult to figure out just what comprises those "new ways" and, indeed, what advanced composition might be. 

This article describes an advanced writing project that brings conventional and electronic text and performance together in a way that approaches what Richard Lanham has labeled "The Rhetorical Paideia". It acknowledges the significance of this shift and the importance of electronic text as an advanced form of writing, and I believe, offers a compelling model of one approach to advanced composition. 

Defining Advanced Composition and the problem

Advanced composition is, as a rule, a hard course to pin down. Instructors and administrators define "advanced" in various ways. In fact, one of the few points of agreement about advanced composition is that it acknowledges a world of writing beyond freshman composition. How this is done can vary dramatically from one instructor to another. Katherine and John Adams offer eighteen variations on the advanced composition theme in Teaching Advanced Composition : Why and How . In the Adams collection, Toby Fulwiler describes how he asked students to explore personal voice in their writing and that of others (103). Mary Fuller's class looked at style. Fuller asked her students to become aware of their own stylistic usage in writing, and she strived to "expose students to a full range of stylistic strategies, and to examine quite carefully how those strategies affect their writing(131). Sam Watson describes a course in which he emphasizes the dialogue of writing through letters (133). Others explore writing theory, argumentation, the enthymeme, community, creative nonfiction, and more, all under the advanced composition umbrella. At my institution, the official course description states, "The major objectives are to develop the skill of the student in his own writing, to develop his self-confidence by giving him knowledge regarding good writing, to develop his ability to recognize the components of a good sentence, and, thus, to avoid shoddy writing." This description could apply to every writing course we offer.

Naturally, this blurry understanding of the course can make it difficult to conceive and design, but I soon discovered that it opened the door to creativity, experimentation, and innovation. As it turned out the little guidance I'd had in defining and teaching advanced composition became an unexpected advantage as the course evolved.

Elizabeth Penfield calls the teacher of advanced composition "an anarchist and a loner" who "is often solely responsible for developing and stating the course's goals, the means by which they will be achieved, the standards by which the students' writing will be judged, and the syllabus, if any" (20). Michael Carter suggests that this failure to clearly define what is advanced about the course causes most teachers of advanced composition to see the courses as extensions of freshman composition. Initially I was no different. I had been teaching the course as a survey of text, asking students to write about and emulate a range of rhetorical forms. The course began with Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and sampled work from a vast rhetorical and historical range from conventional argument to electronic forms, a selection that I found difficult to structure coherently in a semester-long class. I taught the course in a computer lab, yet my students wrote rather conventional papers in what was, beneath the machinery, a conventional classroom. It was disappointing. Nevertheless, even in that somewhat scattered mixture of text and writing, I was beginning to do what many other advanced composition instructors have done -- I looked to my personal interests and strengths to bring a different kind of writing course to students. In doing so, I began to patch together an advanced composition course that combined the instructor's interests, the students' strengths and old and new rhetorics.  

For a good part of my teaching career I had tried to incorporate portfolios in my writing courses, especially composition. They simply seemed to make sense as the best alternative to examinations or final papers. Little by little, I began adding presentation to complement portfolios in my more advanced courses.  Slowly, over two years of teaching advanced composition, I began to shift toward this  "project" approach to writing assessment in which conventional, electronic and performance texts intersected to form a complementary triad.  In effect, and partly by chance, the course was evolving toward a writing experience that approached Richard Lanham's Rhetorical Paideia.