Joke Issue: Writing Seminar removed because it says and does nothing

While writing seminar has been at the core of the freshman academic schedule for years, Director of Critical Writing Valerie Ross announced Tuesday that it will be removed as a core requirement starting fall 2013.

“Although writing seminar was intended to improve the overall performance of students as they entered college, we found that the class was not useful and showed minimal effectiveness in terms of honing writing skills,” Ross said. “We decided as a department that the whole class was really unnecessary and time could be better spent fulfilling some of the other requirements.”

Each class covered a specific topic of interest and required students to write a midterm and final paper as well as weekly outlines of chapters in various literary books and writing skills books. Students noted that the class was extremely time-consuming and took away from other work that was more integral to their Penn experience.

“I spent hours doing ‘says-does’ outlines for the books we had to read for class and I never had time for other homework,” College freshman Sandra Krioke said. “Says: writing seminar will help me become a better writer. Does: nothing.”

Ross also noted that a majority of students were underperforming in the class, saying the average for the classes was a C.

“We had to curve the classes heavily, because Penn students just can’t write,” she added.

Others noted that the assignments themselves were not intended to promote improvement in their writing and were just there for the sake of doing writing exercises.

“I never really understood the point of all the outlines or the writing error charts that we had to do,” Wharton junior James Rolin said. “So I suck at writing and I have a lot of errors — whatever. You don’t need writing in finance.”

Although the classes themselves did provide an overview of specific topics, ranging from the analysis of the television show “Will and Grace” to an in depth look at gossip in literature, the structures of the classes were all built the same, giving professors little room to be creative.

“We were all required to assign our students the same assignments, despite the fact that we were all dealing with very different topics and writing styles,” English professor Blaine Anderson said. “My class was centered on writing in comic books, and I wish I had more freedom to give them more alternative assignments, such as creating comic strips of their own.”

A survey of the freshman class revealed that a majority of students would have rather selected an English class that involved intensive writing, rather than take writing seminar, which in their opinion is “antiquated.”

“We are at such a progressive institution and we should be taking classes that are designed to promote student growth and new forms of learning,” Engineering sophomore Darien Kettlewell said. “Writing seminar, in my opinion, is one of the weakest classes offered here because the structure of the class and the syllabi are too systematized and do not allow students to grow as writers.”

While almost all students expressed enthusiasm at the announcement that writing seminar would no longer be a requirement a small handful appeared disappointed.

“I felt the class was an integral part of my learning experience,” Nursing sophomore Leah Geller said. “It was extremely helpful in making my writing better. Other students will suffer from its removal.”

This article appeared in the Daily Pennsylvanian’s Joke Issue 2013. For more information, click here.

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