Nearing the end of high-school senior year, the before-departing English assignment was to select three experiences, assignments, or persons who contributed the most to my budding understanding of the subject. This required a detail their contribution, specific moments of breakthrough, and time frame if applicable. The paper accounted a field trip to Hemingway’s Key West home–invigorating a practical application of writing (a living can be made), a short-story I had written in elementary school about a dog lost on a raft out at sea, and Mrs. Feldborg, whose praise, criticism, and very-used donation of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye showcased the sensitive, nurturing, and revealing nature of literature. Most of this was bullshit. I’ve never been to Hemingway’s house and the story written in elementary school was terrible and done out of obligation. I got an A, but didn’t feel any closer to understanding my understanding. This was because I approached the assignment with the same obsessive adherence to the prompt I always did–give one experience, assignment, and person that stands out under associations with Literature–and that was that. “One of the common assumptions of…composition…is that at some ‘stage’ in the process of composing an essay a writer’s ideas or his motives must be tailored to the needs and expectations of his audience” (Bartholomae 9). The “Why” had been buried in anecdotes and there was no reason to dig.
I’d figured out exposition. I knew how to write to keep my teachers from frustration and that was enough. Students new to college-level writing, whose literary efforts haven’t expanded beyond personal accounts and obvious narrative, have learned the same thing. The concept of argument, of proving something, is foreign. Argument, in this way, is the discourse awaiting appropriation, and it’s a monster in importance and introduction. College writing require a pushing of the self–the main staple of high-school argument–to the edge of consciousness in favor of assertion, evidence, and discussion. It’s an uncomfortable place for a centerpiece.