9 Wrapping Up

By considering some of the major differences between high school and college-level writing in this chapter, we have allowed ourselves to percolate on the purpose of writing practice that differs from one educational institution to another. We’ve also thought about how the audience for writing changes across these different educational contexts. In high school, the purpose of learning to write is often determined by the school district’s emphasis on achievement in standardized testing scenarios or rigid, state-mandated curricula that leaves little room for organic, creative exploration of writing as a process or of research as a way of coming to find new and unexpected answers. To those ends, the immediate audience is the teacher or the entities that determine what good writing looks like, which in turn creates a context for writing that can be firm and defined, like a limited menu.

College writing, on the other hand, resists such definition. In college, your purpose is to practice writing in a way that invites you to ponder and to push back on the standardized expectations of what writing should look like because there is more than one way to write well. At the same time, you have a professional audience of readers—your classmates, your instructor, and a broader audience of potential readers with whom you might share your writing—who yearn to read a piece composed with feeling, one that is stylish, well-formatted, easy to read but also backed by credible research. These expectations shift based on the context within which we write, of course, so that when major political, social, or global events come to bear on our lives, we find ways to address the new conditions in which we live and work. Writing in college is very much about waking up to the world around you and writing in a way that responds to that world. Much like the restaurant metaphor at the start of this chapter, when writing for a college audience, you should enter and leave a piece feeling like you’ve partaken in a memorable, satisfying experience. You should look around and notice all the care that goes into such a sensory, well-presented experience. Enjoy the sights and sounds that your words can produce. You have arrived. Grab a fork and dive in.