Take English 101 or Just Write? A Teacher’s View
I’m a writer, but I teach college English to make money. I often critique my friends’ writing with a teacher’s eye. (Note: I ask permission. Most want the intense scrutiny, and if they don’t, I back it off a notch.) While I do sometimes correct the same mistakes in my fellow bloggers’ work as I do in my students’, on the whole, the bloggers are better writers. Yet, several, especially those who are some years out of college, have asked if a basic writing course would help them. The answer is no. Here are five reasons why:
1) English 101 is formulaic; blogging is creative
English comp courses help students write college essays. That’s it. Although my students do compose one narrative piece, I’m really teaching them how to combine research and analysis so they can pass the writing component of any class.
In contrast, blogging follows a less rigid structure, with room for divergent patterns. Indeed, bloggers should change up post formats.
2) English 101 is boring; blogging is supposed to be fun
There, yes, I said it. There’s nothing sexy about learning how to write thesis statements. But thesis statements are necessary in college. In contrast, a blog post can be perfectly logical, utterly readable, and totally focused without ever iterating its thesis.
3) Grammar is easy to look up
Blogging allows for a more grammatical flexibility than English 101. That’s not to say bloggers can throw good grammar out the window and keep an audience. But there are well known bloggers who screw up lie/lay all the time. Most blog readers will overlook small grammar errors (ugh, and sometimes even huge ones,) in an otherwise well-written piece.
Moreover, most writers have a couple of go-to mistakes, things they always get wrong. It’s simple enough to learn what these are, proofread for them when editing, then visit sites like Grammar Girl for specific guidance.
4) You’re better than you think you are
While bloggers can sometimes rival freshmen for grammar problems, engaging freshman essays are rare beasts. English 101 is a subjectless class. Often, students choose essay topics, typically picking things they consider scholarly, rather than ones they consider interesting. The resulting dry essays reflect the authors’ lack of passion.
Bloggers, on the other hand, write whenever they want. Even those who force themselves to compose a post a day rarely lose quality to volume, because they ultimately care about the end result in a way that few students care about their essays.
5) It’s not economically sound
Finally, most bloggers aren’t blogging for a living. (If they are, they have a large enough audience, whatever their grammar issues might be.) Most writers have day jobs. That means we have a limited number of dollars to dedicate to the business of blogging, and we need to spend those as wisely as possible.
While a return to a degree program might necessitate taking English 101, the casual blogger would benefit far more from a creative writing class (fiction or nonfiction). Money spent in that way would produce immediate results that an introductory course couldn’t possibly offer.
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Filed under: "Writing Lessons from the Writing Life" Tagged: blog, blogging, goals, learning, problem solving, success, writer, writing
