Rose and Apstein

In his article, Rose targets the issues that face unskilled writers in the college setting (what a new and intriguing topic!). He claims that today's writing curriculum focuses on only improving the technical skills of these writers through remedial drills and practices. What is wrong with this system, Rose says, is that "such work is built on a set of highly questionable assumptions: that a writer has a relatively fixed repository of linguistic blunders that can be pinpointed and corrected through drill..." (345). In reality, this offers only a simplistic understanding of where the problems truly lie, which are within the institution itself, and the scientific, quantifiable way in which it deals with students who are not adequately prepared for college-level writing. There is inherent danger in this method, because it focuses only on technical errors, rather on how we are able to present the knowledge we have gleaned from various courses through our writing.

I remember taking short-answer or short-essay tests in high school, and even in some finals for college classes, and I cringe at how bad my writing probably was. The only thing I (and most other students) concentrate on is getting the facts down on paper, to prove our understanding of a subject. This method, however, completely trivializes the discipline of writing, because isn't part of learning about the ability to not only restate what you have learned, but to eloquently write about how these facts relate to the real world, or even questioning what you've learned? The alternative is basically regurgitating facts out of a textbook, and let's face it, anyone can do that. Higher education is about applying what we've learned to our lives outside of the classroom, and writing aids us in doing just that.

All I really learned from Apstein's short article was how she agreed with Rose's article, but believes that, in order to give merit to his argument, he would have to specify the type of writinghe means, the kind in which one interprets the curriculum, which ilustrates how one actively engages in building one's knowledge on a subject.