An Experiment in Teaching First-Year Composition

Abstract

Every year I am confronted with a large class in freshman English. The course of study exacts that, for composition work, I give this class what is known in textbook phraseology as with and without plot. Now I cannot begin this by saying to my class, Write a narrative. I might as well tell them to write a Latin or Greek sonnet. So during the first term I attempt nothing more than a sort of apprenticeship in narrative writing, that is, I endeavor to pick up the loose ends of their previous composition work by exercises in sentence-structure, variety of expression, punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, and things of similar nature, until I get the class into the habit of writing daily, or two or three times a week, good, well-constructed paragraphs about subjects taken from their everyday life-narratives of their little experiences at home, at play, or at school. During this time I strive to impress upon them the essentials of good, strong narrative; namely, action and movement with careful selection of details. These I exemplify by reference to their literature, as they are reading at this time Treasure Island, Lady of the Lake, and similar stirring narratives. By the end of the first term, they have gained a good foundation in the principles of clear, straight-forward narrative without plot, and the beginning of the second term finds them ready to undertake narration with simple plot. I confess that word plot sounds rather appalling for pupils in first-year English, nevertheless they can be made to see that if something interferes with the natural course of events in their simple narratives, a complexity of incident will result which is a plot. In beginning this subject I usually take some narrative of a simple incident-a buggy-ride, for instance. I ask the pupils to introduce 671