Jennifer Zoble

The practice of writing rarely seems to inspire neutrality in people, students especially. When students walk into a college writing class, they most likely bring complicated feelings about writing accrued over 12+ years of schooling—which means 12+ years of often contradictory messages about what good and bad writing is, what an essay (or poem or play or story) is, what a scholar sounds like, what an introduction and conclusion require, when it’s permissible to use the first person, how to present evidence, whether adverbs are evil, what it means to be creative, and, above all, what their own communicative strengths and weaknesses are. 

While I don’t think contradiction is a bad thing, I do think it’s unfortunate that so much of what we learn about writing can end up getting in our way and leave us struggling to retain the qualities of wonder, curiosity, and immediacy that breathe life into an essay. Therefore my main goal is to help students develop an authentic sense of purpose in their writing and a renewed appetite for risk and discovery. I encourage students to use my class as a laboratory for exchanging and testing ideas, and I draw from a wide range of thematically linked texts and media in order to remind students that even within limitations of form and content, their expressive possibilities are vast.