One of the things my colleagues and I are discussing is developing sections of Composition specifically for our Professional Writing majors. Though we don’t have enough majors to fill a section of CPN each year, we can at least get them all together. We can also use the courses for recruitment, so that’s not bad either. Also, it really adds two more courses onto our major without effecting our students courseload at all. In turn we can remove some requirements and give them more electives.

The thing with building pilot programs, in my experience, is that they always sound good in theory, and one can almost always construct a heroic pedagogic narrative or two as a result for purposes of publishing after the fact. In constructing these classes, we’re not talking about a solving the "problem" of composition for Cortland or anyone else. Our classs, admittedly, in fact intentionally, is for students who, as professsional writing majors, have an existing interest in writing. Certainly this sets them apart from many of their peers.

In truth, for me, the fundamental error in composition is its founding institutional raison d’etre: students cannot write (well). That is, composition is founded upon the identification of a "problem." The problem, however, is built into the institutional hailing of the college student; i.e., a college student can be defined, in part, as one who does not write well (or at least as well as professionals or college faculty). A related part of the definition is that a college student is one who does not know (much) (or as much as faculty).

Who can deny such definitions? Any individual exceptions only serve to prove the general rule, eh?

This lack (of discipline, ability, knowledge, experience) serves the Nietzschean mechanism of ressentiment and bad conscience that leads to the ascetic ideal upheld by the pedagogue: learn this habit of thought, develop this disciplinary practice, master this body of knowledge, and your lack may be mitigated.

So I would begin any approach to composition with setting aside this notion of lack. Instead of mitigating some absence, writing might be understood as the proliferation of thought. I think this is generally recognized, and instruction often seeks to limit the potential for proliferation by sequestering it within "brainstorming" or invention. Writing instruction quickly turns to controlling this proliferation and targeting writing toward a purpose: completion of an assignment, approximation of the simulacrum of "good" academic writing, and achievement of pre-established course goals.

Here are some activities that might comprise the course I am envisioning:

• Writing without direct grade evaluation: this would take various electronic formats. A personal blog that would be more journal like (a record of writing activities, responses to readings, whatever else). A course blog that would be focuses on course themes and issues. The grade would simply reflect that students contribute regularly (content is not specifically graded). However a different type of evaluation would take place through the way in which others respond to one’s writing. I don’t see this as anything particularly radical or even new. My point here though is that students need to write far more than a teacher can formally evaluate.
• Developing writing heuristics: the problem with examining the rhetorical features of completed texts and trying to imitate their features is that the product obscures the process. Instead one must develop compositional tactics. Rhetoric, as a philosophy, may provide ideas about writing or even strategies. Tactics are related to such matters but are far more mobile and mutative. In my view the development of tactics is heuristic/experimental.
• Intersecting experience with reading/theory: here I borrow from a cultural studies methodology. Experience is a powerful form of knowledge, particularly for students. It is clearly ideological, but it is also formed from material events and affective responses that are not simply ideological. The notion here is to use a reading to revisit an experience via a heuristic, proliferating writing practice.
• Identifying and responding to exigency: a grade is an exigency but a poor one. One must think about the fundamental, rhetorical objective of higher education: to persuade a professional audience that one is a member of their community. This is likely an exigency that students can recognize for themselves. In our major students often imagine themselves as published writers or professional editors or going on to graduate school. This may seem to take us back toward approximating expert writers, but I think there is an important difference. Imitating professional authors may have some use for developing as a writer, but one need to differentiate between imitating an author’s end product and uncovering rhetorical tactics. In responding to this exigency, students need to develop tactics for acheiving there rhetorical goals. This is, in effect, what they already attempt to do when they try to guess what the professor wants them to say in a paper, or when they ask "what do I need to do to get an ‘A’?" (Answer: don’t ask that question!)

Anyway, clearly the rhetorical tactic I’m employing now is rambling, so I will stop and think more on this.

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