In a recent chapel talk, history teacher and Webb alumnus Dave Fawcett described the values that have girded our school since its founding, particularly Thompson Webb's dictum that “a student’s word is his bond.” This statement resonates in our English department, as our teachers cultivate not only the virtues of personal accountability and academic honesty, but also the recognition of the written word’s power to shape the public perception and reputation of a writer.
On its face, a finely wrought piece of writing—rigorous in argument and energetic in style—reflects its author’s nimble intellect, command of the language, and attention to grammatical nuance. More broadly, it reveals the writer’s respect for her audience, her conviction in her ideas, and her willingness to engage in dialogue about those ideas. It is the hallmark of a rigorous and conscientious mind. Good writing, however, requires hard—albeit rewarding—work.
The web and its widgets, from email to Facebook to Twitter and beyond, have been both a boon and a peril to younger writers who, in their enthusiasm to communicate, sacrifice clarity for haste, forgetting that despite the seemingly ephemeral nature of online communiqués, what one commits to a blog, a tweet, or a Facebook wall is strangely permanent: today’s blogspot comma splice may well haunt tomorrow’s Googled reference check.
Our department began looking for ways to combat a contemporary writing culture that too often eschews rigor, reflection, and revision, and last January we inaugurated Webb’s e-portfolio system: an electronic folder into which a student files every writing assignment she creates throughout her Webb career. The pedagogical benefits of the system abound: using Microsoft Word’s Comment function, teachers can make annotations on the electronic copy of the document—a process further streamlined by an electronic rubric—and quickly return graded assignments to the e-portfolio, allowing students to more effectively revise a work in progress and creating a virtual toolbox of expert suggestions and commentary for students’ future use.
The portfolios also facilitate opportunities for peer editing exercises and class workshops, allowing a piece of writing to transcend the traditionally parochial exchange between student and teacher. An advisor might dip into an advisee’s portfolio to see a snapshot of her current work; a history teacher might peruse his students’ English essays to suss out how well they embed quotations; a tenth-grade teacher might look at the work her students produced as ninth-graders, framing her understanding of their grammatical mastery and needs. As students recognize that they are creating pieces for multiple audiences, they embrace the unglamorous but necessary task of refining their grammar, mechanics, and rhetoric; as those pieces accumulate from one year to the next, students create a body of work reflecting their authorial growth and reminding them that they are accountable for the work they create in their names.
To underscore the crucial importance of writing in a world beyond the classroom, our English faculty has designed projects and assessments to challenge students to apply their writing in contexts far different from the formal critical essay, encouraging students to write with an awareness of—and obligation to—a broad and diverse audience. Freshmen will write chapel talks; sophomores will author guidebooks for a virtual Renaissance museum; juniors will write and produce radio shows in the style of NPR’s “This American Life.”
As every frustrated student of literature knows, we only rarely have the luxury of hearing an author explain the intentions of a text: Shakespeare cannot tell us whether Hamlet knows that Polonius is behind the arras; we cannot ask Wallace Stevens for the identity of the emperor of ice cream; T.S. Eliot will never reveal J. Alfred Prufrock’s overwhelming question. Just as great literature stands by itself, so too must our own great writing; we cannot rely on the possibility of being able to offer ex post facto excuses, explanations, or caveats to our readers. Thus, as our students challenge themselves to elevate their written expression, we in turn challenge them to recall Thompson Webb’s charge to our community: that our word is indeed our bond.
