The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year

By N. Sommers, Laura Saltz. College Composition & Communication, 2004

232 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Why do some students prosper as college writers, moving forward with their writing, while others lose interest? In this essay we explore some of the paradoxes of writing development by focusing on the central role the freshman year plays in this development. We argue that students who make the greatest gains as writers throughout college (1) initially accept their status as novices and (2) see in writing a larger purpose than fulfilling an assignment. Based on the evidence of our longitudinal study, we conclude that the story of the freshman year is not one of dramatic changes on paper; it is the story of changes within the writers themselves.

Subfields: Education, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c67a39c930a49483fff31bd0103060affe9ceebb

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In Education

1. Johndan Johnson-Eilola
2. Stuart A. Selber

Citations in the corpus

• Tracing Discursive Resources: How Students Use Prior Genre Knowledge to Negotiate New Writing Contexts in First-Year Composition (2011, background): “…& Ackerman, 1988; Carroll, 2002; Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Paré, 1999; Dias & Paré, 2000; Dively & Nelms, 2007; Jarratt, Mack, Sartor, & Watson, 2009; McCarthy, 1987; McDonald, 2006; Smart, 2000; Smart & Brown, 2002; Sommers & Saltz, 2004; Sternglass, 1997; Walvoord & McCarthy, 1990; Wardle, 2007).”
• Plagiarism, originality, assemblage (2007, background): “And teachers attempt to build a picture of individual and social processes over time (Sommers & Saltz, 2004).”