The Seminar Paper is a Blight

from the pedagogy files

[As I was working back through my Twitter archive, I happened upon this, which I wrote about two and a half years ago, published on Medium, and promptly forgot about. This was back when I was toying with the idea of doing on that platform what I’ve ended up doing here on Substack. Anyways, I thought I’d move it over, and I may do the same for a couple of other pieces. Insofar as I have a teaching philosophy, this would be a major part of it. -cgb]

In the spring of 2005, I taught a graduate course titled Network(ed) Rhetorics. In my syllabus for that course, I included a section called “Course Rhythm” where I wrote the following:

“By this point in your careers as graduate students, you are no doubt experts at the traditional semesterly rhythm of courses, which operate according to an economy of:

* a fairly well-defined subject area to be covered in the course of a semester;

* a relatively consistent weekly reading load (100–150 pages a week, sometimes more);

* ongoing, informal writing assignments (reading notes, short essays);

* lectures and/or class discussions focused on the explication of course readings;

* a capstone project, due at the end of the semester, typically modeled after the base unit of currency in our field, the 20–25 page academic essay/article/chapter

This model of the academic course is one we have inherited from print culture — it is focused around the consumption of books and targeted at the production of print scholarship. We will not be abandoning this economy altogether — we will still read a few books — but the majority of our attention and energy will be spent on the networks we study, and as a result, the rhythm of the course will change.

Although I have challenged each of those elements at various times in the graduate courses I’ve taught over the past 15 years, I was particularly interested in disrupting the final one, the idea that every graduate course must conclude with a 20–25 page essay. During that course, I’d taken to calling this the “binge-and-purge” model: consume as much knowledge as possible for 14 weeks and then vomit back 25 pages or so in a 2–3 day, caffeine-induced frenzy. Multiply this by 3 or 4 courses, and you have the typical semester for a graduate student completing coursework in the humanities.

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It took me longer than it was supposed to for me to write my first book. I’d made very little progress on it at my first job; when I was hired at Syracuse and allowed to “reset” my tenure clock, I readily did so. It wasn’t that I wasn’t publishing, but I struggled to move beyond the scope of an article-length piece of writing. But a couple of things changed for me.

First, I started blogging. After flirting with the idea for maybe a year, I finally took the plunge in August, 2003 (RIP, Collin vs Blog). Over the next five years, I averaged around 200 posts a year, most of which were at least moderately substantial and often intertextual (in the sense that I was reading and citing others’ blogs as well as my own posts). At the very least, the rhythm of my own writing changed substantially.

The second thing that happened, not long after I started blogging regularly, was that I went up for my third-year review at Syracuse. I remember very little of it, except to note that my 3YR committee told me that I was much further along in my book project than I had felt at the time. I had converted three of my dissertation chapters (arrangement, style (you’ll need a Flash emulator to see that one), and memory) into articles, but I hadn’t yet made the personal leap to a big picture. Nevertheless, I chose to believe them. Once I did, it didn’t take me long at all. I revised those articles (and the other chapters) and built a frame around them that cohered, and I did it all in the summer of 2004. How did I do it that quickly? Mostly by writing every day, with much of that writing being moderately substantial and heavily intertextual (in terms of understanding how the different chapters played with and off of each other as well as the citation characteristic of academic work in the humanities).

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I submitted my MS in September of 2004, went on sabbatical that fall, and returned in the spring to teach a graduate course in the spring of 2005. I was convinced then (and remain so now) that blogging, and changing my relationship to the rhythm of writing, was what enabled me to write my book. I didn’t pose it in such stark terms to my students, nor did I tell them what I would say now: the binge-and-purge model of writing instruction that most graduate programs follow is a blight, a collective failure of imagination, and it is a source of embarrassment to me that my own field (which focuses in large part on the teaching of writing) should be so bad at it when it comes to its graduate students.

The purgative writing that we ask of our students at the end of each semester is a regressive and harmful approach to teaching (and learning) writing. Students persist and succeed in graduate school despite this approach, not because of it. It almost guarantees substandard work, under physically and emotionally destructive conditions. It instantiates work habits that are not only the opposite of those that graduate students will likely need in their careers, but ones that they are forced to actively unlearn to be able to write a thesis or dissertation. In demanding seminar papers, we are creating massive obstacles to our students’ success.

That’s why I decided in the spring of 2005 to stop assigning them.

For years after, I felt no small amount of anxiety over this decision, even though I could make both theoretical and pragmatic arguments for doing so. I quite literally worried that, if my colleagues ever found out what I was doing, I wouldn’t be allowed to teach graduate courses anymore. The binge-and-purge model was so ingrained in me that even though I knew it was trash, I felt guilty about not replicating it.

Fortunately, over the years, that guilt has faded. And the assignments and projects that I’ve developed over that same time have, I believe, been better for my students, resulted in better work on their part, and contributed in some small way to what I feel is a more ethical approach to graduate education.

“Autonomous Crumpled Paper” by dam is licensed under CC BY 2.0

There are any number of skills that go into writing a successful article, chapter, or monograph, and I suspect that most of us would agree on the vast majority of them. But that doesn’t mean that they all need to be exercised simultaneously, or in each graduate course our students take. This seems like such an obvious point to make, but basketball teams don’t practice (exclusively) by playing full games of basketball — a practice might include cardio/stamina training, strength conditioning, ball-handling, shooting, passing, etc. It is important to scrimmage, I assume, but it’s not the only way that players prepare for games.

Similarly, there’s no reason why the various skills that go into academic writing can’t be unbundled and practiced at smaller scales over the course of a semester (or in different courses, for that matter). I could go into exhaustive (and exhausting) detail about the different projects that I’ve asked my students for, but that list would include:

Several different approaches to citation mapping

Keyword tracking and tracing

Knowledge management practices and tools

Aggregation of reading notes and/or bibliographies

Unit/course/curriculum design

Transmedia (visual reading notes, website design, kinetic typography, et al.)

Small scale synthesis (editor’s introductions, e.g.)

Genre work (abstracts, introductions, proposals)

Portfolios of short, speculative work (paper or project proposals, e.g.)

I’ve been teaching for a long time, and I’ve taught lots of different types and topics of courses. Across all of them, though, I’ve tried to create a space where we could practice the various skills that go into academic writing, without resorting to the worst common denominator of grad school writing, the seminar paper.

Some of those essays are great; few students choose to attend graduate school who aren’t at least capable of churning out a seminar paper. Many of us, myself included, have learned how to write by doing them. And there are many professors who assign them, guide them, and respond to them with the utmost conscientiousness. And yet, the semesterly binge-and-purge habituates students into a writing practice that actively interferes with the demands that the dissertation will later place upon them. It does not prepare students for that process. Nor does it do them favors later on, whether or not they ultimately choose a career in academia. It’s simply not how writers work. We know this. We can do so much better, and our students deserve that from us.