In order to develop a personal style, students in our advanced writing courses are going to have to take risks, and I think we want to show them in our comments and in our own personal writing style that we value risk-taking. It requires a certain amount of courage to depart from the formulaic five-paragraph essay or its variants that have probably served our students well enough in most of their academic courses, but they will never write really well unless they are willing to let go of the merely serviceable and take risks with form and style in their writing. If we value originality and I hope that we do then we have to encourage our writing students to stray from the straight and very narrow path of formulaic academic prose and experiment with a more spacious style. One of the ways we can do this, and at the same time encourage them to explore more difficult and complex ideas, is to welcome their attempts at writing in progress, to be willing to look at drafts of papers, not just final products. This way we can help them sort out their ideas, suggest forms that grow organically from content, encourage their attempts to play with language, and give them some positive reinforcement for the risks they are taking in their writing.
Writing is a way of knowing, a way of learning.
This is as true for instructors of writing as it is for students. It is too easy for us to be casual when we talk our thoughts about a student s paper into a tape recorder. If we are forced to consider our words, to put our own thoughts into writing, we are likely to be more careful about what we say. If we are to encourage our students to develop the qualities of good writing that I have mentioned, then rather than giving in to the media-orientation of our students, we should try to cultivate in them, by our own example, a love of language and respect for the written word.