English 6625 (Teaching Composition: Theory and Practice) offers graduate students a background in the major theories and pedagogies that continue to shape best practices in the teaching of writing at the college level.

Can you remember exactly when you learned to write? or how? Or can you remember the major moments in your personal writing development? My guess is that you cannot. You can probably locate teachers that stand out for you, or even specific writing assignments or experiences that you particularly enjoyed or felt proud of. Most likely, you can also think of negative experiences that continue to haunt you. But you've probably never been asked to think about how you learned to write. You just did. Sometime. Somewhere. You couldn't; then you could.

English 6625 focuses on the complex and mysterious concept of "teaching writing." Some argue that writing cannot be taught at all; others disagree. Regardless, as any linguist will tell you, writing is an unnatural act; it must be learned/taught/picked up/mimicked/etc. And quite regardless of what you might hear from college teachers about how college students "can't write," that's simply not true. No fully illiterate student can get into a major college in this day and age. What that teacher usually means is, "This student doesn't write like I think an X-major should write." That, of course, can definitely be taught.

In this course, we'll explore some of the major theoretical concepts that have sought to explain what writing is, how it is done, how we learn to do it or don't, and what any of this nebulous business might look like in a classroom setting.