Brock's commencement speech

Thank you, Dean Allen. And thank you all for coming.

I’m humbled by this award, and I want to share this honor with the people I have the privilege to supervise, the real heroes of the USU composition program, the graduate students, lecturers, and adjuncts who teach English 1010 and 2010, USU’s general education writing classes. These courses, and their teachers, seldom get the recognition they deserve. Yet these courses constitute the very core of the humanities, and I am proud of the job these teachers do helping their students to improve the thinking, writing, and reading skills essential to all education.

People unacquainted with college composition might imagine that any good writer, or certainly anyone with a degree in English, could teach first-year writing with a minimum of training. In fact, our new teachers complete 145 hours of instruction and supervised teaching by the end of their first year. We put them through a 40-hour bootcamp before the semester even begins.

These teachers then use their creativity, energy, and training to help students develop a whole alphabet of skills—they analyze, brainstorm, connect, define, evaluate, focus, gather, highlight. Students learn to work together, to mine their own experiences and opinions for ideas and value, to establish criteria and base judgments on them, to recognize logical fallacies like the slippery slope and (my favorite) the poisoned well.  Students discover that writing IS thinking, and that work on their writing translates into improved  thinking and ideas.

Today’s new teachers understand how their work fits into students’ lives and educations  much better than did previous generations of teachers. English teachers used to assume that students would be able to employ in other situations reading and writing skills learned in English class. That assumption turned out to be faulty—the ability to write a good personal narrative in English does not guarantee that a student will write a good business plan or anthropology report. So now we discuss in class how different disciplines have different writing requirements, and we train students to probe, analyze, and question when they’re writing in a new discipline.

USU’s English 1010 and 2010 students benefit from another crucial shift in the teaching of writing, a quiet revolution based on the insight that writing is a process. When I was learning to write, whatever happened between the teacher’s prompt and the student’s product was a mystery for the student alone to grapple with. Decades later, we still haven’t figured out the right way to write—the mystery is still there--but we now have hundreds of strategies for approaching writing projects and conquering writing problems. These strategies transfer—a student who learns in English 1010 to interview effectively or to ask librarians for help or to outline in a productive way can easily take such skills to the next writing situation.

Once you see writing as a process, you see process everywhere—in how we become friends, how we acquire habits and skills, how we adapt to new places, how we get our degrees. There’s mystery at the heart of many processes; we often look back and ask, with the Talking Heads, How did I get here? For those of you graduating today, the degree is a symbol of a life-changing accomplishment but also of your engagement in the processes of Utah State University, taking courses, getting to know peers and professors, creating social connections, developing a sense of community, learning to learn, maybe even coming to enjoy writing. Those are the things that you’ll carry with you. I’d like you to join me in giving a round of applause for all the hard-working composition teachers at USU who have helped the graduating class better understand and enjoy the mysterious and wonderful processes of learning.