Worried about the low literacy levels and poor writing skills of college graduates, composition professors have spent decades debating the question: Should college writing courses teach content (critical reading and in-class debates about social and cultural topics) or form (essay design, paragraph arrangement, and sentence-level syntax, grammar, and vocabulary)?

To my mind, they’re chasing a red herring.  Once we’re actually in the composition classroom, we inevitably combine form with content, regardless of our theoretical pedagogical standpoint.  Anti-content-ers like Stanley Fish pretend that content-rich composition courses rely on “the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow.”  Of course, no one would base a curriculum on such an idiotic notion; rather, some instructors teach composition through thematic readings with the understanding that shared background knowledge will help students build more complex arguments; others use essays about “big ideas” as models students can emulate in their own writing.  Few anti-content teachers would deny the importance of building a knowledge base or following good writing models.  Conversely, even those pro-content composition instructors who strenuously declare, “I do NOT teach grammar,” ultimately are forced to attend to sentences in one way or another.

The Freshman Inquiry Writing Seminar at City College of New York, profiled this month in Inside Higher Education, has provided a curricular counterpart to my claim that writing courses always combine form with content.  The six-credit seminar links a content instructor from one of the disciplines with a writing instructor from the English department, often a Master’s or MFA student.  So, the students learn about a subject–examples include “Energy” and “Comic Books and Conflict”–and they learn how to write about that subject.  Form enriched by content, content supported by form.

Of course, I would prefer to see universities take the writing instruction side of such courses a little more seriously; as the article explains, the content instructor is often the “real” (full-time, tenured) professor and the writing instructor is a contingent laborer.  But that’s a topic for another blog post.