Alison ChapmanIn my seven years as chair of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Department of English, I have often reflected, with a certain ironic amusement and—yes—nostalgia, on the kind of writing I did, decades ago, as an English major at a small liberal arts college. We were asked to produce finely crafted, carefully researched essays with a thesis sentence right up front, in which we leaned attentively into the work of interpretation and analysis. I loved writing these polished little essays. I was good at them. And because I was good at them, I later turned out to be good at being a scholar, which is part of what I do as a university professor.
But that’s not the whole story. After graduation and subsequent employment, I realized that the kind of writing I had been taught wasn’t necessarily the kind of writing my various supervisors wanted from me. I scrambled to figure out how to craft a concise memo, how to understand the audience for a grant proposal, how to construct a survey, how to combine words and images into an effective flyer, how to write a firm newsletter where no one expected—or wanted—to encounter a thesis statement. I figured these things out in part because my undergraduate education had taught me how to stick with a problem and had developed in me the basic building blocks of elegant, effective communication. But still, I had to figure them out.
It wasn’t until I became a college professor and thereby a writing teacher that I began truly contemplating the gap between the writing I had been taught and the writing that I had practiced in the working world. Digital communications have recently made this gap even wider. In a typical day, I might write text for a new departmental website with an eye to how portions could be repurposed for social media and or an email newsletter—and how those might later form the basis of a new podcast series or be the seedbed for a marketing campaign. The truth is that I love this kind of writing too. It’s shaggier and more sprawling than the serenely contained essays of my college years. It feels more dynamic. My writing has also gotten more creative, in that I’ve realized how much a feel for narrative and imagery can transform any piece of writing: even a memo benefits from a recognizable sense of voice, and the best websites, at heart, tell a story.
My ideal curriculum would give students a working familiarity with many kinds of writing: literary analysis, fiction, technical writing, and others. Each of these offers different lessons: literary analysis is about preferring open-ended questions to pat answers; fiction is about creativity and nuance; technical writing is about precision and the need for fact. Also in my ideal curriculum, students would become savvy digital users, as comfortable with desktop publishing and video editing software as with the trusty word processor.
Increasingly, my UAB colleagues and I have been working to transform these ideals into the lived reality of our classrooms. I’m seeing more freshman writing classes that emphasize creativity. More literature classes that require students to draw on an awareness of new media. More linguistics classes that ask students to use sophisticated digital tools. This last example represents one of the most significant changes of the past few years; to adopt a metaphor from the sciences, one might call it a kind of pedagogical red shift. There are simply more digital—and digitally inventive—assignments than ever before.
Examples of this abound at all levels, but because I’ve been thinking here about my own evolution as a writer, I’ll point to a History of the Book class I’m teaching this semester. This course is a rollicking ride from papyrus scrolls through illuminated manuscripts through Kindle e-books. Recently, I asked students to visit UAB’s medical history library, choose a book from before 1500 (that’s right, before 1500), and then create a digital microsite that chronicles what it’s like to handle pages and bindings that are half a millennium old.
I smile wryly to myself as I compare this assignment to the ones presented me as an undergraduate. I don’t mean that my History of the Book assignment is better just because it has a sparkling, digital shine. My college essays—which I bet were the traditionally stodgy five paragraphs—taught me a prodigious amount about wrestling complex ideas into disciplined sentences. But there were things those assignments didn’t teach me. I want our students to be presented with writing and critical thinking challenges that I did not face and to emerge with digital and technical proficiencies that took me half a career to develop. If my colleagues and I can do that—and we’re getting better at it every year—I think we’ll have done admirable work.
Alison Chapman, Ph.D., is the chair of the Department of English.
