Most composition students are straight out of high school and have limited work experience. Some have served in the military or have held full-time jobs, and there are increasing numbers of these "nontraditional" students with work experience and "life experience." Such students usually raise the level of discussion in composition classes, but, for most of us, a composition class means twenty to twenty-five (or more, unfortunately) teenagers in transition. Most composition students have limited familiarity with career-type work and therefore do not recognize the importance of developing writing skills for their work.

Most composition students aren't going to be English majors, much less English teachers. Most composition instructors no longer assign analyses of literature, but some still do. Others have students writing poetry in expository writing classes, and personal narrative and expressive writing are common approaches. Clearly, such assignments can help students develop writing skills, but they are far removed from the types of writing our graduates will do in their work. Practice presenting information and argument to an audience other than the instructor would be more relevant.

Many composition students don't know what they want to do in their work after college; those who do usually find themselves working in another field, often doing something they never imagined themselves doing. When they understand the realities of the job market (and Career Services staff can help them through class presentations), students become more receptive to the idea of preparing for a range of possible vocations.

Many composition students didn't like English in high school. Often, they had to write essays on literary works they didn't understand. Many didn't read well or never really learned to do more than tell the words. Many couldn't spell and wrote papers that received failing grades for spelling errors. Nothing frustrates students more than failing when they are trying, and many writing students failed in high school (and fail in college) not because they can't write but because they can't read, or can't edit or proofread. When we fail to determine why an individual student has trouble writing, we can't do much to help. All we can do is drop back to the mass-production approach that administrators seem to promote. And when the student is a first-year student who feels awkward about approaching an instructor for help, it becomes all the more difficult to get to the bottom of a writing problem.

Most composition students can write better than they (and we) think they can, when we help them understand the writing process and invite them to write about what they care about. However, we need to help them recognize that in their work they will write about what they know, not what they care about, and they will write to communicate information and/or persuade, not to explore their thoughts and feelings or to develop as thinkers and writers.

Most composition students have little familiarity with the types of documents created in business and government agencies: proposals, reports (progress, final, monthly, interim, case, feasibility, recommendation, evaluation, incident, trip, planning, annual, etc), letters, memos, instructions (including hardware and software documentation), resumes, briefing materials, speeches, financial statements, budgets, articles, monographs, books, and so on. Just skimming the indexes of three or four good texts in technical or business writing will reveal the range of types of documents that composition students will go on to write or contribute to in their work. Most composition students are not familiar with such documents; neither are many composition instructors.

Most composition instructors are more comfortable when they have students write the types of documents that the instructors themselves are familiar with:

personal narratives, argumentative essays, and research papers (which very few composition students will go on to write in their work). Unfamiliar with what their students will have to write when they graduate, many instructors rely on academic assignments-research papers, even analyses of literature. This approach prepares students to do academic writing, especially if they major in the liberal arts. But how many students write research papers these days outside of composition courses?

Although training in academic writing serves a valuable purpose, it can only do so much to prepare students for writing in nonacademic settings, where writers have a different audience and purpose. Students write over and over for an expert audience: an instructor. Their reader knows more about the subject than they do, or knows better how to write that kind of assignment. Professionals in business and government usually write for readers who know less than they do about what they are writing about. Students write in school to show how much they know about a subject; the primary use for writing in schools is for testing, of course. Professionals, though, write to communicate information to readers who know less than they do about the subject. It is essential for students (and professionals) to recognize these differences in audience and purpose to be successful in nonacademic writing.

Much student writing is writer-centered. Good nonacademic writing, however, is reader-centered. Although writing writer-centered prose can help a writer get started, as Linda Flower noted ( 1979), writers in professional settings need to write reader-centered prose. Students write to show how much they know; nonacademic writers (successful ones, at least) write not to show how much they know but to inform their audience. At least some of the assignments in a composition course should help students learn how to convert writercentered prose to reader-centered prose.

Many composition courses don't teach students how to write good sentences, much less how to analyze and improve writing at the sentence level. Students are warned about comma splices and fragments and run-on sentences, but in most composition courses students don't study syntax and style enough that they understand the different ways to state a sentence, much less enjoy capturing the nuance that understanding syntax permits.

Many composition courses are taught by the English faculty least prepared to teach writing--graduate students one or two years removed from the academic writing they did as English majors (and still doing academic writing in their course work or on a thesis or dissertation), junior faculty not long removed from work on a dissertation, and experienced faculty who would rather be teaching something else. Many of us have actually heard an administrator say, "Anyone can teach composition." That's true. But then, anyone can do brain surgery. The trick is to do it well. Composition is hard to teach well, for reasons reviewed in these generalizations, but sometimes it is taught by those least prepared or inclined to teach it.