General Education A

Freshman composition is unpopular at almost every university; Harvard is no exception. Except for the honors sections in General Education A, few regard the course as a stimulating experience. To a large extent, this hostility is inevitable, since Gen Ed A is the only required course at Harvard. Another reason for dissatisfaction is that the subjects assigned matter little to the students. Consequently, papers take progressively less and less of the student's time and attention. The twenty minute paper may indeed be a myth, but it is a myth with enough basis in fact to indicate the average student's inability to become at all enthused about his subject matter.

A method to avoid the lack of concern most students display toward Gen Ed A papers might well be to have papers, written for their general education courses, also submitted to Gen Ed A section men for comment and criticism. Theoretically, the papers done for all general education courses are supposed to help teach freshmen how to write. In fact, the average section man in these courses either does not feel competent to comment on the stylistic aspects of the paper or feels it burdensome to do so, and limits his comments to evaluations of the ideas expressed.

The use of these papers in Gen Ed A would insure a wider selection of topic and a deeper concern for performance. Thus there will be a better basis upon which to evaluate and criticize writing style. Not all the shorter assignments need be discarded; a proper balance might be to require three papers written for other courses and three of the shorter type now assigned in Gen Ed A. For many students who find writing an almost traumatic experience this would have the added advantage of decreasing the number of papers written during the freshman year, thus making more time available for the adjustment to college work. The main advantage remains, however, that submitting the longer, more carefully done, more meaningful paper for stylistic comment will help the student's writing more than any amount of comment on the too-often hastily written and unmeaningful papers now required of freshmen in Gen Ed A.