On Wednesday September 21st, Emerson College professor John Timbur was invited by the department of University Studies to give a conference titled Open Admissions and the birth of Modern Composition. Although it is a topic I really do not know much about, I still found the speech pretty didactic and easy to understand. Overall, the conference dealt with the nature of composition, focusing specially on basic writers.
Timbur argued that open admissions programs during the 60's and 70's were instrumental to the birth of modern composition, starting a reinvention of the way in which we normally see the writing process. The CUNY adopted the open admissions method for the first time during the Fall of 1970. Though there were no admissions exams, students still had to take placement texts. The concrete example we had was an essay written to the prompt What is reality?. The point of analyzing the essay was to demonstrate how even works like this, that violate the expectations of academy, gave a great insight on the nature of composition. According to Mina Shaughnessy, essays like these are not chaotic, as it might seem at first: they only follow their own order or organization. Though a person's first reaction is to correct the mistakes (and this is true, because I was so tempted to do the same), Shaughnessy argues that we should first understand the cause and origin of the error itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment