X Does not Lead to Y

While reading through Rodby and Fox’s article, I couldn’t help but relate their findings and ideas to my first year as a college writer. It took me back to those first college writing classes and assignments and forced me to relate my experiences with their research. In doing so, I saw how logical and important their ideas and findings are.  The one section of the article that stood out to me the most was the Emerging Principles about Writing Instruction section. In this section, the authors introduce principles that they have developed throughout their research on first year college writers that they feel must be followed in order to effectively produce successful college writers. The first principle really stood out to me both as a former first year college student and a former educator. Rodby and Fox state: “One learns to participate in a particular writing practice by being engaged in that practice and not by learning some other writing practice with the idea that the latter prepares writers for the former” (88). Through my personal experience as a first year college writer, I know this to be true. Although I did not attend Chico State as a freshman, I had a somewhat similar format as the workshops for first year students. My freshman English class had one professor and two writing tutors who students were assigned to if the content of their writing was not up to par. The writing tutors would have sessions with the students a couple times a week to help them with their papers. After our first paper, I was one of those students assigned to a tutor. We were doing a poetry section and I could not figure out how to analyze the poems and then write about their meaning and significance in a structured way. I remember failing the first assignment in that section and thinking I was never going to graduate college. That was before I began to attend the tutoring sessions, however. Very similar to the workshops here at Chico State, the tutors would help each of us out individually and also have work in groups on the problems we were having with our writing. In doing this, I was able to work hands on with the tutors and my classmates and get the extra instruction I needed in order to better myself as a writer. And I did better myself as a writer. I ended the semester with an A in the class and huge weight lifted. If I was instead sent to a lower level class where we learned to write narratives and compare and contrast essays, I know I would have never gain the skills I needed in order to better myself in that poetry section. As Rodby and Fox state: “…our repeated observations [showed] x did not lead to y” (88). Meaning putting students in a remedial class where “lower” levels of writing were taught did not benefit them as writers in the long run.