It Was Never Just About the Essay

I’m going to try not to make this political, but I make no promises. I teach freshman composition, African American literature and journalism. In the comp classes we don’t have interesting content to read and write about that is mandated by our curriculum. It’s just teach them to write, organize, use appropriate conventions. Actually it says more overgeneralized statements like “Write for specific rhetorical contexts, including circumstance, purpose, topic, audience, and writer, as well as the writing’s ethical, political, and cultural implications.” There’s so much to unpack here. You’d be surprised by how different professors are in the interpretation of what this means in our classrooms.

I mean just the first part alone is meaningful. “Write for specific rhetorical contexts” means adjusting your writing based on the purpose, audience, and situation in which the writing will be used. It recognizes that writing is not one-size-fits-all. Effective writers make intentional choices depending on who they are writing to, why they are writing, and where the writing will appear. In our students’ minds, I alone am the audience. They don’t often see the significance of writing for a specific rhetorical context, so we have to teach them what that means. So I give them the theme of “Truth in the US Elections and the Current Administrations Policies.” Now we have content to read and write about. I tell them if you’re mad or happy about immigration policies in this country, then who needs to hear your arguments? What is your purpose in writing? What is the context or situation? We discuss where and how the writing can be used.

The last part of that one course objective, “as well as the writing’s ethical, political, and cultural implications,” means students must think about the impact and responsibility of their writing, not just the technical aspects like audience or purpose. It asks them to consider how their words affect others and how their writing fits into larger social systems. I tell them their writing can be a form of protest or support for ideas, which makes writing more meaningful. I want them to know how writing connects to power, policies, public issues, or viewpoints. So yeah, it’s political, but it’s the real world. Writing can influence how people think about social issues, government actions, or public debates. I tell students, yes, your writing can do that, and I’m going to teach you how. That’s what this class is all about.

But what about the “cultural implications” in this course objective? Why is that in there? I want students to know that writing relates to people’s identities, backgrounds, values, and lived experiences. We’re all different. We come from different places metaphorically. As a writer, they should be aware of cultural differences and respect diverse perspectives. We don’t get to see that very often in society today, so it can be a challenge teaching this. Students often just want to repeat what they are constantly hearing in the media (news and social) instead of researching and finding the truth.

So Freshman Composition is so much more than teaching students to write. It is about helping them understand how writing actually works in the real world. It is about teaching them to think critically, to recognize audience and purpose, and to make intentional choices instead of just filling space on a page. It is where they begin to see that their words carry weight, that writing can inform, challenge, question, and create change. It is also where many of them, often for the first time, realize that their own experiences, perspectives, and voices belong in academic spaces. Freshman Composition is not just a writing class. It is a class about awareness, confidence, and learning how to participate in conversations that matter.