This essay asks us to focus on the purpose of college-writing before we try to define it. THe goals of writing courses and programs are very different from instructor to instuctor, from university to university across the country. This affects student ability to transfer skills and our ability to define what we would like them to transfer. Knodt analyzes several common composition programs (the five-paragraph essay, classical rhetoric, sociopolitical, WAC, first-year orientation, and professional writing) and shows how they provide students with very different backgrounds and experiences in writing. She claims that one single approch to composition pedagogy is both improbable and impractical, but urges the different paradigms to collaborate and communicate , to use the WPA outcomes as a "template or touchstone" (152) to help students know what they need to be successful in any writing classroom. This would in turn provide a definition for college-level writing.
I think is a very good way of demonstarting the need for communication among writing faculty (though not a new idea), but the closest she comes to defining college level writing is the WPA Outcomes. I guess this is better than not defining it at all.
The problem that i have with Knodt including the WPA outcomes is that before she introduces them, she says that "a single approach is both unrealistic and undesirable". Aren't the WPA outcomes are sort of "single approach", implicating that all FYC's adhere to this approach? The WPA format reminds me of TAKS objectives, in that while teachers are allowed to teach accordoing to thier style and choice, by the end of the year they are still expected to reach those "objectives" just as college faculty would be expected to reach those "outcomes". Of course, the immediate danger of this is that just as there are math teachers that teach the TAKS objectives devoid of connections to each other or even to the concepts of math (there is a difference between teaching the conceptual understanding of fractions and teaching the skill of adding/subtracting fractions; guess which one is tested by the TAKS test?), there may be faculty that would end up teaching the WPA outcomes rather than writing/composition.
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