The Idea of an Essay, Volume 2

184 composed in the excitement and thrill of a girl he’s been dating. She’s something special, so he’s been writing all evening, trying to capture his feelings for her. He’s motivated, to say the least. Another writer stations himself on the opposite side of the room, typing away at his cold, gray desk. Clackety-clack, tap-tap-tap. The sounds of this composition are much slower, and the author does not take time in poring over his work, trying to capture the slightest detail. Rather, this student stays up late because he has put off his writing assignment until the day before it was due. Why? Because he is not motivated. In fact, he’s neglected this assignment for weeks, and knows that once he turns the paper in, all he is going to get is purple pen marks for his labor. Not red lip marks like his fellow writer. The biggest problem with Composition classes is the lack of motivation for students. The problem starts when students are given assignments that don’t relate directly to them. The tedious writing practice may call to an English major, or a writing-intensive major, but to the average student, there is nothing exciting in writing an essay, about something that does not interest them. As Lucille Parkinson McCarthy summarized, in her article “A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing Across the Curriculum,” students write best on topics that they find relevant and exciting (245). A problem is created because the papers that student write do not relate to them, meaning students do not have any motivation to learn more about the topic that they are discussing. The problem of motivation augments with the grading process. Students formulate paragraph after paragraph, only to hand it to the teacher, who then straps the piece to his Procrustean table to be hacked down to size. No student wants to turn in an essay that they know is going to be graded and handed back with no real application. Not only do student write papers that are graded and archived, but they are forced to write paper after paper, each one only standing for hours of work that will be covered in purple and then hidden forever. Students are not motivated to write for the sake of writing, but for the sake of producing something that the teacher wants. In the case of Dave Garrison, each work that he produced was simply what he thought the teacher wanted, and dedicated only as much time to each paper as he thought the teacher would like (McCarthy 244). Students realize that they are simply carrying out the task of producing paper after paper, and are not