Toward Undying Prose

English A, joy of the esthete and bane of the less creative, is a dying actor on the Harvard scene. But its venerable life has been given momentary reprieve by failure of the Committee on General Education to act on its own suggestion and integrate the teaching of writing into the framework of the General Education program. In its 1945 report the Committee maintained that the segregation of English composition from other fields of learning was a serious weakness in the present system. However, the suggested plan remains lost in the voluminous report, since next year's nearly doubled schedule of experimental courses makes no provision for even one trial course to ease the later transition from English A into the more diffused method of teaching composition.

Like all section courses, English A stands or falls on the instructor. The format has not changed in decades. Attached to the twice-weekly section meetings is reading, often interesting in itself, but determined more by the predilection of the section man than by a logical scheme. Marking, also, is highly individualistic. The tendency is not to mark papers too high, but to undervalue them. If the instructor is really able, the most useful part of English A lies in the conferences, devoted to individual problems, which again depends with the instructor.

Though the best-attended undergraduate course puts the finger of responsibility for improvement in writing on a single instructor, it also has the undesirable effect of creating disinterestedness on the part of faculty members outside the English department. By making composition an integral part of the required General Education courses the Committee hopes to make all instructors style-conscious and extend the realm of intelligible writing beyond the Freshman level. Since such a change would be made only with difficulty, a period of experimentation on a small scale is needed to smooth the way for later conversion when the time comes to tell incoming Freshmen that six of the sixteen courses required for a degree must be in the field of General Education.

Theme requirements in courses inaugurated last fall range from two or three a term to one a month. Most corrections are on the basis of ideas related to the course with little or no attention paid to writing ability. This is in sharp contrast to the Committee's recommendation that the English instructors, after being absorbed by the general education program, should discuss weekly themes in conference with each individual student. Though this ultimate goal will require time, the very fact that it is a difficult changeover necessitates early experimentation to locate the wrinkles so they may be ironed out before General Education grows out of its present embryonic stage.