In composition courses, we might do some things differently to prepare students better for the writing they will do in their careers.

Have Students Write Reader-Centered Prose

The tendency to ask students to write about personal experience may stem in part from instructors' fear that students don't know much except what's current, and that when most students write about current issues, even less controversial ones, they quickly get in over their heads. So students are asked to write about personal experience, in the hope that introspection and reflection will produce something of substance, and it often does. However, in their careers no supervisor will ask them to analyze their personal experience and write about it as part of their work. Instead, our graduates will be proposing and reporting on projects, disseminating information to clients or the general public, writing letters, and so on. Writing about personal experience in composition doesn't prepare them to do that. It can motivate writers and make them feel good about themselves and about us (we're interested in and care about their experience), but it misleads them into thinking that their experience is what is important. To be successful when they write in professional settings, they must remember that they write not for themselves but for their readers and the organization they represent.

Have Students Present Information to Different Audiences

When students write to other students who know less than they do about what they are talking about, they must consider how to approach an audience other than the expert (the teacher). This "lay" audience more closely resembles the audiences they will write for in their careers. Writing for less-informed readers, students learn that they need to provide background information, avoid or define unfamiliar terms, motivate the reader to read the piece, slow the pace, simplify the style, and use other techniques. Toby Fulwiler has stressed the importance of students' awareness of other audiences, including "an external, outside-the-classroom audience" (24).

Some of the information and argument we invite students to present should come from their own discipline. Suggesting Writing-to-Learn strategies here may seem adverse to what is being argued, as Writing-to-Learn focuses on the writer, not the reader. However, the aim of such programs--to allow students to explore and inform themselves about their subject--is consistent with an emphasis on writing to inform readers. Students should be encouraged to present information from their specialty (or a course) to less-knowledgeable readers, as they will usually do when they write in their careers.

We should teach students how to write for readers who do not know much about their subject. A common assignment in the second semester is a set of instructions explaining how to do something they know how to do but the reader doesn't. To avoid students' choosing to explain how to tie a shoe or make a pizza, the instructor might specify that the procedure come from their field or one of their courses, or from work in their field.

Another assignment often used to introduce the concept of a different audience and to prepare students for work is the resume. The resume assignment doesn't work well, however, for composition students (but high school and even middle school students in Virginia write one as an assignment). Most composition students have so little education and experience relevant to an entrylevel position in their field that they must focus on personal information. The exercise usually does not prepare students to write a professional resume, because they're just not ready to have a resume. Similarly, many composition students aren't ready for collaborative writing projects, but composition should involve some collaborative work, as it is the norm in nonacademic writing. Peer review is a good introduction to collaborative writing, though, and after peer review is working well collaborative projects might be assigned.

Several writers have examined how instructors invite students to address nonacademic audiences in writing assignments. In their analysis of writing assignments in an anthropology course, Anne Herrington and Deborah Cadman discuss the instructor's emphasis on writing for nonacademic audiences. Of the four assignments, one article reported research to other specialists, and the next reworked that information into an article designed for a general audience such as the readers of Smithsonian or Natural History (193-96). Lester Faigley and Kristine Hansen suggest that "differences in the expectations and beliefs that readers bring to a text tend to be ignored in freshman English courses . . . [but] teachers of courses on writing in the disciplines . . . collide head on with these differences, which handbook notions of correctness and narrowly construed ideas of process cannot accommodate" (148). Anne Herrington's discussion of reports in two chemical engineering courses, Lab and Design, examines students' and instructors' perceptions of the audiences, who differed in their knowledge of the subject, and reinforces the need to define audiences carefully (109-13). Douglas Eagles reports using peer review "to make the students aware that they were writing for the audience that would judge their work for the rest of their careers: their peers" (20). How instructors might vary the audiences of related documents is exemplified in William Mullin's discussion of assignments in physics in Programs That Work (212-14). Anne Herrington's discussion of lab reports illustrates how the purposes of related documents might differ for different audiences (114-16).

Teach Students How to Use Illustrations

Except in engineering, technical communication, and scattered courses in business and science, students are not taught how to use graphics to present information. However, anyone who reads a business or government agency report, or an article in a newspaper or a magazine, recognizes how much writers rely on illustrations. They present information that is difficult to present in text, break up the text, invite readers into the discussion, emphasize important information, and so on. Many composition texts have no more illustrations than an occasional cartoon, although discussion of graphics for papers and reports will soon become common in composition texts. Composition courses should stress communication through illustrations, as classes in the sciences do with lab reports, because it is only in some academic writing that the words do it all.

Teach Students How to Use Peer Review Productively

Peer review of drafts and final documents is standard in professional settings, and students should be taught how to review peers' drafts. Gail Hearn's discussion of peer review of assignments in ecology ( Programs That Work14854), which provides an excellent model, establishes the connection between the peer review and collaboration that students do and their work as professionals.

Peer review of a draft should address content, organization, format, and appropriateness for the audience. However, composition students often mistake peer review of a draft for proofreading, so the instructor must clarify these steps in the writing process. Students will still tend to look for spelling mistakes and awkward phrasing, just as some less useful reviewers do in business and government. We should encourage students to avoid addressing such issues, possibly by asking that all comments be made on a review sheet, with no notes on the draft.

Peer review will be difficult when surface errors distract the reviewer, so we should stress that each draft be well edited and proofread. Unfortunately, many writing teachers still use the term "rough draft" to refer to a draft prepared for peer review. No one but the writer should see a rough draft. For review, writers should prepare a first draft that is as good as they can make it on their own. When students bring to class for review a draft that has been well written, edited, and proofread, reviewers will not be distracted by sentence-level problems. Then, with training and practice, they will be able to make more useful suggestions about content, organization, format, and appropriateness for the audience. We need to help students learn how to use peer review effectively and be able to rely on themselves and their peers, rather than a supervisor, for critical comment on a first draft.

Have Students Research Writing in Their Field

Having students find out about the writing that professionals in their field do can be very useful. A common assignment in professional writing classes is a report on what professionals in the student's field write--the types of documents and their audience, purpose, frequency, length, and so on. For this assignment, students often interview professionals in their field (academics as well as nonacademics) to gather information. This introduces students to the way professionals in business and government gather information--not by going to the library or getting on the Internet.

Such an assignment can be difficult for those composition students who have no idea what they want to do in their careers, but they might be encouraged to choose a field for the purpose of this assignment, and doing so can help them see whether they might be interested in that field. When students have a sense of what they will need to be able to write in their careers, and when they have heard from professionals other than English instructors how important writing is, they often work harder in writing courses.

Encourage, but Limit, Revision

We all encourage revision, but we should discourage more than one revision after we have commented on a paper. Some instructors allow a student to revise over and over until the student is satisfied with the grade the latest revision has earned. At first this policy seems good, as students should be encouraged to revise and polish their work through drafts, but it may create a dangerous sense that a writer doesn't have to get it right the first or second or third time. No employer wants an employee drafting a document repeatedly, although in some ill-managed situations that does happen, as Susan Kleimann has shown ( 1991), especially in government agencies.

We need to encourage students to make their first draft as good as they can make it on their own. The second draft should be as good as they can make it with reviewers' comments and subsequent revising, editing, and proofreading. And the final draft must be as good as they can make it using the instructor's (supervisor's) comments. In an efficient business or agency, writers don't work a document over and over, and we should not lead students to think that they will be able to revise a document continuously until they get it right.

Insist on Correctness

Mistakes in spelling, grammar, and usage damage professional documents, and we should help students understand the need for correctness. Too often, instructors dismiss spelling errors as "typos," suggesting that they are not that significant. However, some instructors and programs have had a "three spelling mistakes and it's automatically an F" policy. Clearly, there's disagreement among instructors about how significant spelling and other such errors are. In business and government, however, there's no disagreement. For Gail Hearn, in the report on scientific research "there can be absolutely no error in spelling, grammar, or English usage," because "skillfully written, well-illustrated, and error-free manuscripts come to represent to the stranger reading the report the quality of scientific research" (149). Julia Harding stresses that in business, "the writing must be perfect . . . business writers jeopardize their credibility if they commit errors in spelling, word choice, format, and sentence structure" (209). In professional documents, errors in spelling, grammar, or usage suggest sloppiness or ignorance, and some readers question the accuracy of the information in a document with errors in presentation. So it is important that we help students understand that correctness does matter.

As Toby Fulwiler and Art Young rightly note, "teaching grammar and usage is not teaching writing" (292), but we must teach grammar and usage as we address editing. In writing in business and government, correctness is essential to create the sense that the organization pays attention to detail. We should also encourage students to pay attention to "little things" such as formatting, spacing, justification, and margins. We should require proper margins, spacing, type font and size, and page numbering, and the reference format that is standard in the writer's field, not necessarily MLA. Students should be encouraged to identify and learn the proper reference format(s) in their field--and if they don't have a major, they should learn APA format, as it is so widely used.

We should teach sentence structure and punctuation to all students, and teach grammar individually as needed. Students need only a few punctuation guidelines to cover most of the internal punctuation needed in papers and reports, and it is easy enough to teach students how to punctuate if the instructor can talk about parts of speech, phrases, and especially main clauses. Recent approaches to teaching punctuation, such as John Dawkins' ( 1995), simplify concepts and emphasize the role of grammar and punctuation in clarifying meaning. Similarly, five or six guidelines about sentence structure can help students control their writing. Richard Lanham "Who's Kicking Who?" is a good way into discussing word order and emphasis, and it allows the instructor to move into guidelines for effective sentences (1-6).

Web sites such as Jack Lynch's provide instruction in grammar and usage; a listing of other such sites can be found at Linda DeVore's site and in library databases. Articles such as those in Newsweek by Charles Larson ( 1995) and Patricia O'Conner ( 1996), and by Frank Grazian in Public Relations Quarterly ( 1997), address grammar issues with humor and are entertaining, as are William Safire's columns in The New York Times Magazine and whatever Steve Martin writes about writing in The New York Times Magazine or The New Yorker. Such materials, which are easily accessed, can encourage students to think about grammar, punctuation, and usage and keep instruction in these areas from being the parsing and dull memorization that bored so many of them (and us).

Avoid Using Letter Grades

Very few people outside academia use letter grades to evaluate a document, and to prepare students for writing in their careers we should evaluate their work the way it will be evaluated by a supervisor or client, with evaluative comments or a point system. Most composition students receive far more thorough feedback on their writing than they will get in their careers, but the letter grade an assignment receives may be all that the student really pays attention to. We need to encourage students to solicit and consider readers' responses to their writing rather than risk discouraging such behavior by assigning a letter grade, even to an excellent paper.

Make Sure Students Are Computer-Literate

We should encourage students to become skilled with a word-processing program and familiar with at least one operating system. More and more students enter composition courses competent in word processing, but many still do not. Because most will be doing their own typing until they are well into their careers, they need to be proficient with this writing tool, and unless the school offers tutorials, composition becomes the place for students to learn how to process words. Instructors need to be familiar with common programs such as Word and WordPerfect to help some students learn the basics and to help all students become more proficient. Instructors need to be able to explain the limitations of writing aids such as spelling and grammar checkers.

Encourage Students to Identify Their Subject, Audience, and Purpose

Most students focus their writing better when they identify clearly in their introduction the paper's subject, audience, and purpose (unless the audience and purpose are understood from the assignment, as in many traditional composition and academic writing assignments). Some instructors argue that we should discourage students from "mapping the particular (concrete) language of the assignment into the opening paragraph of the paper" ( Williams and Colomb102), but a clear indication of the subject, audience, and purpose of a document in its introduction is standard in business and government writing.

Teach Students How to Read

We ask students to read, assuming they can. However, too many composition students read poorly. Rightly or not, most people assume that English class is the place for them to learn how to read better. Few composition instructors, however, have been trained to teach reading. The ability to read and the ability to write are inextricably linked, and we cannot assume that we can help students develop one ability when most of us are not qualified to help them develop the other. Instruction in teaching reading should be a significant component in any program in teaching writing.

Drop the Research Paper from Composition

Outside of English and a few other programs in the Humanities, fewer and fewer instructors are requiring a traditional research paper. When instructors outside of English assign research papers, they often complain about the quality of the papers they get and fault composition instructors generally. They complain that the students haven't been taught how to do research (and write up research) in that field--and of course, they're right. So unless we teach discipline-specific research papers and the methodology they involve, perhaps we shouldn't try to teach first-year students how to write a research paper. As Lester Faigley and Kristine Hansen point out, however, teaching students how to write such a paper requires that teachers learn about the discipline, not just the characteristic parts of a report on research in that discipline (149).

Most English instructors are understandably reluctant to teach students how to do research in biology or finance. As WAC programs have shown, it makes sense for the biology or finance instructor to teach the students how to do research and then teach them how to write it up. Students writing the review of literature for a research article in a field in which they have done research will be more motivated than students in second-semester composition, because they see its applicability. "Writing development is, in part, context-dependent," found Lucille McCarthy, based on a study of a student writer's work in different courses, and "skills mastered in one situation . . . did not automatically transfer to new contexts with differing problems and language and differing amounts of knowledge that [the writer] controlled" (152). When we teach students from many majors about research, we can only generalize, but in writing in their majors, especially in the sciences and business, they need specifics about research.

Reconsider Requiring Composition

To prepare students better for nonacademic and academic writing, we should design and teach courses that students will elect rather than have to take. If composition were no longer a requirement, students who do not need it--and there are many who did not--would have two (semester) or three (quarter) courses for other interests. Many who needed it would elect it and approach it with more enthusiasm. Many who needed it but avoided it would write poorly in courses in their major, and their major professors would have to address the problem rather than just blame writing teachers. Absolved of responsibility for poor student writing, English department and writing faculty could go back to what they were trained to do--to teaching the English language and literature in English, and teaching writing to students who want to learn to write better.

True, English departments and writing programs might have to reduce their staff, but the part-timers and temporaries who are exploited by departments on a term-to-term basis would be encouraged to find full-time or less seasonal/migratory work. And if some tenured faculty had to be let go due to financial exigency, surely each English department has a few tenured faculty (often senior and well paid) who no longer contribute but have not yet retired. Getting rid of the requirement for composition could have other benefits too--Kristine Hansen has recently explored them ( 1998). Perhaps the best reason to do away with the composition requirement is to refuse to accept the idea that our students don't know what's good for them but we faculty do--not the best approach to ensure a positive attitude toward composition.

CONCLUSION