Every student faces a moment when he finds himself in front of a blank page and must, within a limited time, answer a question and make an argument. It has been a long time since frequent longhand writing—not only school assignments, but correspondence, diaries, commonplace books—was a feature of our culture, but whatever the technical changes of how writing is composed and shared, the ability to write clearly and persuasively is invaluable.
Our goal is that every student in the program learns to write good prose. We learn to write well by reading good writers, imitating them, and copying examples of their work into a commonplace book and through frequent short written assignments. Students complete these assignments with pen and paper—turning in both a rough and a clean draft—and learn to use paper editions of writerly tools like lexicons and usage dictionaries. Why do everything on paper and by hand? To avoid the distractions of writing with a computer and to see corrections and revisions between drafts.
Bryan Garner writes in the preface to his famous usage dictionary, “The reality I care about most is that some people still want to use the language well. They want to write effectively; they want to speak effectively. They want their language to be graceful at times and powerful at times. They want to understand how to use words well, how to manipulate sentences, and how to move about in the language without seeming to flail. They want good grammar, but they want more: they want rhetoric in the traditional sense. That is, they want to use language deftly so that it’s fit for their purposes.” That deftness with language is our aim.