Professional Writing at York University:
Honours Writing in Canadian Context
The late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously compared living next to the United
States to sleeping with an elephant. "No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast," said
Trudeau, "one is affected by every twitch and grunt." In education, this entails that while the Canadian
beaver assiduously studies the movements of the American elephant, the large American pachyderm
normally pays scant attention to the industrious aquatic rodent on its northern border. There are, however,
two reasons why faculty teaching honours writing in the US might wish to understand more about
Canadian programs. First, since the implementation of NAFTA, cross-border hiring has become far
simpler and more common than it was in the past. People with PhDs from U.S. universities often apply
for Canadian jobs, and directors of U.S. programs may read applications from Canadian job candidates.
Second, the Canadian emphasis on full four-year honours programs rather than individual honours service
courses, may provide a distinctive and useful model for comprehensive curricular thinking about honours
writing. This article will discuss the York University Professional Writing program, highlighting ways in
which it is both similar and different to writing programs found south of the border1.
Degree Structure
One could say, equally correctly or incorrectly, that the York University Professional Writing program
(hereafter PRWR) offers what observers from the U.S. might describe as either no honours writing
courses or exclusively honours writing courses. It might be better to say that the Canadian context for
writing instruction differs sufficiently from the U.S. one that attempts to use a U.S. or British vocabulary
to describe a Canadian curriculum are misleading; even where the same words are used, the things to
which they refer may differ. In Canadian terms, the York Professional Writing Program is a direct entry
interdisciplinary program offering honors and specialized honours, but not ordinary, degrees. The
meanings of these terms and their implications for writing pedagogy are grounded in historical contexts of
nation, institution, and program.
U.S. post-secondary education is a hybrid built on primarily Scottish (undergraduate) and German
(postgraduate) models, typically organized around (putatively) four year undergraduate majors, in which
1
A complete electronic version of the 2010-11 course calendar (official booklet listing major
requirements, policies, and courses) is available at:
http://www.yorku.ca/laps/en/prwr/documents/1011PRWRMiniCalFinal.pdf
Poster/York - 2
grades and degrees are obtained primarily by coursework, and postgraduate degrees obtained by
combining coursework and research projects. At the undergraduate level, "honours" (degrees cum laude)
are awarded post hoc usually on the basis of overall grades in coursework. Outstanding students, whether
identified at the beginning of their university careers or by outstanding grades in their first few years at
university, may be offered the option of special individual classes or projects (e.g. the "honours thesis"),
but there is, in the US, tremendous variation in the meaning of "honours" both across and within
universities. In the Canadian, like the English, system, the division between "ordinary" and "honours"
applies to degrees rather than individual courses and is a standardized and universal element of the
curriculum.
The Anglo-Canadian honours degree owes its existence, to a large degree, to the need for large
numbers of university educated men in two professions, clergy and civil service, in response to population
growth and social change in wake of the British industrial revolution. In the eighteenth century, Oxford
and Cambridge had served the mutually incompatible functions of being both playgrounds for children of
the wealthy and places of social mobility or professional qualification for the talented or genteel but
impoverished (including second sons). The majority (over 70%) of graduates took holy orders, and a
smaller number continued on to the bar. As many previously clerical functions (e.g. administration of
poor laws, registering of marriages, births and deaths) became secularized in the middle of the nineteenth
century, the civil service absorbed an increasing number of graduates.
Before 1810 at Oxford there was no large scale record keeping mechanism to differentiate
between the best and the worst students; it wasn't needed. With bishops being appointed alternately from
Oxford and Cambridge, and secretarial appointments by recommendation, personal acquaintance and
informal inquiries could easily separate wheat from chaff. By the early nineteenth century, the pressures
of social mobility and population growth made this informal system increasingly untenable2. Degree
classifications were introduced to formalize the distinction between the hardworking "reading men" and
the hard drinking gentlemen. Two sets of degree examinations (in addition to a preliminary examination
not directly relevant to degree classification) were instituted3. The first, and easier examination, usually
taken after three years in residence, would entitle any person who passed it to an ordinary degree; the
second honours (or classification) exam, normally sat after an additional year of study, if passed, would
2
3
See Stray (1997, 1999, 2007) for discussions of the changes in university education in Victorian Britain.
Montague Burrows' Pass and Class is a fascinating example of the study guides for university
examinations which proliferated in the nineteenth centuries. Althgough I do not know of any scholarship
specifically focussing on the 19th century study guides for the exams at British universities, in my work
on 19th century reception of Aristotle (Poster 2001), I encountered numerous equivalents to the 20th
century Masterplots and Cliff Notes, which seemed to increase in frequency of appearance, both as
additions to university student editions of the classics and as stand-alone guides, as the examination
system became to be seen as increasingly important for civil service careers in mid-century.
Poster/York - 3
result in a first, second, or third class honours degree. The earliest conception of the honours degree had a
direct connection with the evolution of writing instruction. Edward Copleston, Provost of Oriel College,
Oxford, and a key figure in the reform of the examination system (and of increased academic rigour in
general) was a mentor, and eventually close friend to Richard Whately, whose Elements of Logic and
Elements of Rhetoric were written with the overt intention of improving Oxford clerical education,
particularly in the area of sermon composition.
Although specific terminology and contents of exams have varied tremendously over time and
institutions, what has remained fairly consistent is the distinction between the three year "ordinary" or
"pass" degree and the four year "honours" or "class" degree. While Canada has retained the English
distinction between ordinary (3 year) and honours (4 year) degrees, rather than separating degree
classifications by high stakes examinations, most Canadian universities simply require additional
coursework with a sustained minimum grade point average for honours degrees. Also, rather than the
classification system for honours degrees used in England (first, second or third, with upper and lower
divisions), Canadian universities report grade point average in coursework, and classify degrees as
specialized honours, honours, or ordinary according to the number and type of credit hours completed.
The York PRWR program is typical of the Canadian model in its configuration of requirements
for degree classifications:
Requirements for York (Honours) Professional Writing Degree:
● A minimum GPA of C+ (5.0 on a 9 point scale)
● A minimum of 120 credits successfully completed
● Specialized Honours: 54 credits in program
● Honours: 42 credits in program
● Double Major: 42 credits in each major
● Double Major/Interdisciplinary: 36 credits in each major
● Major/Minor: 42 credits in the major & 30 credits in the minor
● PRWR does not offer an ordinary degree. An "ordinary" degree in English Department, e.g., requires
30 credits taken in major.
National and Provincial Contexts
Two aspects of Canadian higher education, one generally true of Canada and one specific to Ontario,
affect the way York curricula have been designed, the first having to do with Canadian tertiary education
and the second with a relatively recent change in Ontario secondary education.
Poster/York - 4
On a level of national higher education, Canada differs from the U.S. in the way it distinguishes
universities from colleges. Universities, as in the US, are institutions of tertiary education, offering
undergraduate (BA, BS, etc.) and often postgraduate degrees. The term "college", when used of an
independent institution (as opposed to a university residence), describes something misleadingly similar
to the British "further education" or U.S. "community college" sector. Students, on completing high
school, may continue on to universities, or go to colleges for specialized two year vocational degrees.
Students who have completed two year degrees at colleges may continue on to university. In Canada, as
in the US, the question of transferability of credits is a highly contentious issue, with the provincial
government and the colleges aligned on the side of automatic transferability of credits and the universities
sceptical. Where the system differs from the U.S. one is that the colleges also offer post-baccalaureate,
and sometimes concurrent, certificate and degree programs. Thus a student might go from high school to
college, then to university, and then back to college. Certificate and degree programs in both creative and
professional writing are offered by both colleges (as AA, certificate and MA programs) and universities
(as BA and MA programs). Since both types of institution claim that their professional writing programs
prepare students for writing careers, many of the philosophical issues of the relationship of liberal to
vocational education are framed around questions of how (or if) college and university approaches to
similar material might differ.
On a level of provincial secondary education, through 2002, Ontario secondary education differed
from the U.S. model in offering a "Grade 13", which, like the British sixth form or German gymnasium,
was a year focussed on preparation for university. In 2003, the last students who had completed grade 13
and the first to move from grade 12 directly to university formed a large "double cohort" which moved
through the Ontario tertiary educational system rather like a giant rat through the digestive system of a
snake. This change in secondary education is still transforming curricula at Ontario universities, which
now are admitting a younger and less well-prepared first year cohort than that to which they had once
been accustomed. Much of the content of (and skills developed in) first year general education courses at
U.S. universities (including first year writing), had been the responsibility of Grade 13, and had no
specific university level equivalents. Now, in 2011, Ontario universities are still grappling with
restructuring first year pedagogy. In particular, many universities (and individual departments) are
discussing the need for something similar to the first year writing service courses found in U.S.
universities, a process complicated by the fact that in Ontario, such courses would be viewed (as they
were some thirty or forty years ago in the U.S.) as "remediation", something that should have been
covered in high school (in the much lamented late grade 13), or something needed only by those students
ill-prepared for university. Whether such transitional courses are needed at all, and whether they belong in
individual departments, in campus writing programs, or delegated to the colleges, is increasingly an issue
Poster/York - 5
being discussed in curricular planning, but no strong consensus has emerged, beyond a general sense that
something needs to be done to address the issue of student writing skills (or lack thereof).
Institutional Context
York University, founded in 1959, with a main campus located on the northern edge of Toronto, is
Canada's third largest university, with approximately 47,000 undergraduate and 6,000 postgraduate
students. It is classified as a comprehensive university, which in Canadian context means that it has
several graduate programs (including distinguished business and law schools), but no medical school
(although it is in the process of developing one), and offers fewer postgraduate degrees than research
universities, but more than purely undergraduate institutions. In character, York is distinguished by being
an urban commuter campus (over 65% of students commute by car or public transit), with a strong
commitment to social justice and among the greatest degrees of ethnic diversity of any university in the
world. Each of these characteristics has specific pedagogical implications.
Of these three characteristics, York's commitment to social justice has the least tangible effect on
pedagogy, but it is still important. A extraordinarily high level of awareness of global social issues is
simply taken for granted. When one enters the main campus building complexes, one expects to see at
least one or two protests, a few counter-protests, and tables collecting money or handing out information
for a bewildering variety of causes, from victims of natural disasters (York students collected substantial
amounts of money and supplies for tsunami and earthquake victims) to regional conflicts across the world
(advocates for Israel, Palestine, the Tamil diaspora, etc. are common), and from religion (Jewish, Islamic,
Hindu, and Christian groups are common, but Bahai, Buddhist, Sikh, Sufi, and other faith traditions are
well-represented) to gender (York has a vibrant and highly visible LGBT community). Faculty and staff
unions are an extremely strong voice in university policy with a history of activism -- York claims two of
the three longest faculty strikes in Canadian university history.
York reflects the multiculturalism of Greater Toronto Area (GTA) which consistently ranks
among the top five cities in the world for ethnic diversity4. Over half the population of Toronto consists of
immigrants. Unlike the U.S., where recent immigration is overwhelmingly Hispanic, with a significant
(but smaller) east Asian component, no one group predominates in the GTA. Instead, immigrants from all
areas of the world flock to the GTA, including significant groups from both eastern and western Europe,
the Middle East, and east and south Asia, as well as Africa and South America. This has several
significant pedagogical implications. English is unlikely to be the native language of the parents of the
4
See http://www.toronto.ca/toronto_facts/diversity.htm for Toronto demographic information.
Poster/York - 6
majority of our students. Indeed, most of our students are bi- or multi-lingual. This leads to certain
complications for writing pedagogy. For example, some students who learned English in elite schools
East Asia or Europe (especially eastern Europe) tend to have a far better grasp of English grammar (and
write often with greater mechanical correctness) than average, but students from certain other educational
systems (including, one must acknowledge regretfully, some Canadian ones) have significant difficulties
with prose style, including both diction and syntax. Students trained in India and Pakistan often have
learned very ornate writing styles, using a wider and more vivid vocabulary than that normally taught in
Canada, but may be prone to syntactic errors; moreover, the norms of South Asian English are
increasingly diverging from those of North Atlantic English, and given that there are more English
speakers in India than in the U.S. and Canada combined, there are significant pedagogical questions about
how South Asian (and other world English) writing conventions fit within professional writing pedagogy
within a Canadian university with a significant international population. With no one particular cultural
tradition predominating, the York writing instructor must try to devise assignments and grading rubrics
which respond to a bewildering diversity of rhetorical and linguistic traditions and values.
The final aspect of institutional context that affects pedagogy is location. Commuting times in
Toronto, which average 80 minutes round trip, are among the worst of any major world city surveyed
(including Barcelona, New York, London, Paris, and Los Angeles) according to a recent article in the
Toronto Star.5 The location of York's main (Keele campus) on the northern edge of Toronto makes for
particularly arduous commutes -- two to three hour round trips are normal for students and faculty.
Pedagogically, this makes it very difficult to schedule individual conferences with students. Classes are
normally taught in three hour blocks. Students try to schedule two or three classes on the same day in
order to minimize commuting and accommodate jobs. When students are on campus, they are normally in
class; if they are not in class, they are usually not on campus, and cannot, for example, reasonably be
expected to undergo a two hour round trip commute, or even miss a bus that only departs once every 90
minutes, in order to spend fifteen minutes discussing a paper with an instructor.
Finally, it should be mentioned that York students are generally drawn from a broad range of
economic backgrounds. Many students are the first in their families to attend university. Most have jobs,
and many work close to full time. This student body is one understandably very concerned about
internships and employment opportunities. Moreover, as most of our students have family roots or
connections outside Canada, they view the job market globally, and even as undergraduates may be
freelancing for print or internet media outside Canada and planning to work outside Canada after
graduation (among my students this year alone, Brazil, Dubai, India, and Hungary have been mentioned
as possible locations).
5
"Toronto Commuting Times Worst of 19 Major Cities", Toronto Star (online edition) 19 March 2010.
Poster/York - 7
Program History
The PRWR program was developed in 2003 by Kim Michasiw, then Chair of the English Department,
and admitted its first students in 2004. It was created in response to both students' concerns about what
they could do (with respect to gainful employment) with an English degree and English Department and
Faculty of Arts (since subsumed under the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies) concerns
about declining enrollments. Thus from its earliest iterations, PRWR has needed to articulate a
relationship between traditionally liberal and vocational concerns. This balancing act was further
complicated by the need to grow the program in a manner that was relatively resource and revenue
neutral. This was accomplished by taking advantage of the manner in which York's strategic commitment
to interdisciplinarity is played out on an administrative level by incorporating resources from multiple
departments across the institution into "programs", entities which offer degrees, certificates, or courses,
without necessary owning any resources, but rather being allocated part or full time equivalencies which
they can use to hire non-tenure stream faculty or to "pay" departments for use of individual faculty
members on a per course basis. In particular, PRWR was conceived as a collaborative effort among Arts
(now LA&PS) English, the Centre for Academic Writing (now evolved into the Writing Studies
Department) and Seneca College (as part of Seneca@York, a collaborative entity which offers programs
consisting of both York University and Seneca College courses leading to joint university degrees and
college degrees or certificates.) English has historically been primus inter pares in PRWR, but its
relationship to the PRWR program in far from simple.
York faculty normally have a undergraduate home department. Teaching in both graduate courses
and interdisciplinary programs is a matter of being loaned out to the Faculty of Graduate Studies or the
appropriate interdisciplinary program, usually in return for the cost of replacement by an adjunct.
Individual faculty members normally have appointments to multiple graduate or interdisciplinary
programs on paper, signifying that they are indeed eligible to teach in those programs, even though actual
teaching opportunities may, for practical reasons, be more limited. Certain lines or appointments are, on
occasion, formally dedicated either in whole or part to such arrangements, either on a departmental or an
individual level. So, for example, the undergraduate English Department (now located in the Faculty of
Liberal Arts and Professional Studies) is responsible for providing a certain number of course director
equivalents to graduate English (which is located in the Faculty of Graduate Studies). Currently, two
tenure lines in English are fully dedicated to the undergraduate PRWR program along with several course
director equivalents. In practice, only a rather limited number of people in the English Department
volunteer to teach in PRWR. On a pedagogical level, the English department contributes to PRWR an
emphasis on genre, style, and literary non-fiction.
Poster/York - 8
The Centre for Academic Writing ("CAW", now evolved into the Writing Studies Department)
functioned as a typical university Writing Centre, offering tutoring in writing, undergraduate mini-courses
(often non-credit) in writing, and various seminars on writing pedagogy across campus. As is also
(unfortunately) typical of such organizations, it has been staffed primarily by teaching stream faculty, and
only occasionally by tenure stream faculty interested in pedagogy (often on loan from other departments).
This has led to many of the fairly predictable issues of prestige and support widely discussed in U.S.
scholarship on writing centres. There are two ways in which CAW differs from the U.S. model. First,
there not being a tradition of rhetoric/ composition as a graduate field of study in Canada, CAW draws its
staff from across the university rather than being dominated by composition specialists.. Second, its
intellectual heritage derives as much or more from social sciences as English, and it is concerned with
writing across the curriculum rather than writing as contextualized within a particular discipline.
Although CAW has now become a department of Writing Studies as part of a large scale university wide
reorganization, its writing centre heritage can be seen in its bringing to PRWR a distinctive pedagogical
emphasis on process more than product and teaching in the context of students' own writing.
The third contributor to the York University PRWR program is Seneca College, a completely
separate institution that is engaged in several joint ventures with York and operates its own mini-campus,
as it were, on the York campus. On a bureaucratic level, the collaboration is far from seamless – budget
and registration systems are perennially troublesome. While the basic concept underlying the academic
role of Seneca in the program is fairly clear, and Seneca staff integral to the program, committee
discussions concerning role of Seneca seem always to reveal structural issues the program needs to
address.
In the initial design of the program, Seneca was intended to provide practical expertise, serving as
a bridge between the humanistic and theoretical material taught by York faculty and the careers for which
students were being trained. There were two justifications for this: first, the traditional career orientation
that Seneca shares with other colleges, and second, staffing. Because York is very highly unionized, we
tend to resist the casualization of academic labour and have a strong seniority system even for part time
faculty. PRWR, however, for its more professionally oriented courses, needs the flexibility to hire
working professionals, rather than traditional adjuncts. Many of our specialized upper level courses can
only be taught credibly by people active in the book or periodical industries – working editors or
journalists who might wish to teach one or two courses occasionally for a change of pace or a bit of extra
cash (or, occasionally the perceived prestige of academic affiliation). Seneca has more flexibility in hiring
such outside professionals than York departments, especially in the case of experienced professionals who
lack advanced academic degrees.
Poster/York - 9
The concept of having Seneca staff teach specialized professionally focussed courses and York
providing general humanistic, theoretical, and historical courses, resulted in very odd sequencing for
students. The humanistic background courses tended to be offered at first and second year levels, and the
more specialized professionally oriented courses in the third and fourth year, and thus students tend to
have more York courses in the first two years and more Seneca courses in the final two years of their
programs. Many curricular meetings have been devoted to grappling with this issue. On the one hand, the
final years of the program, when students are immediately concerned with getting jobs, and thus with
clearly job-related skills, seems a logical place for narrowly pre-professional courses in editing,
presentation, publishing, and periodical writing, and the first two years a more logical place for
foundational writing and critical thinking skills (rhetoric, argument, critical reading, prose style, etc.). On
the other hand, especially in an honours program, straightforward technical skills courses (e.g.
proofreading, copyediting) seem less intellectually demanding than more complex humanistic courses
involving history and theory. Our current solution is to require a limited number of humanistic courses in
third and fourth years (.e.g. ones in the areas of ethics of writing, book history, and rhetorical criticism of
media), with one theoretical and one practical capstone in the fourth year. The difficulty of balancing the
humanistic and professional though, remains an ongoing challenge for the program, though it should be
noted that the potential difficulties are to a large degree ameliorated by the actual nature of the Seneca
staff, who, even when they are cast in the role of teacher/practitioners, bring to their courses a wide range
of humanistic interests. The degree to which this affects pedagogy was brought home to me when I ran
into a student from my winter ethics class in the corridor in fall. She was taking a practical fourth year
course taught by a working journalist. She recounted that he began a discussion of an ethical problem he'd
encountered at work by saying "I'm not sure if any of you have heard of Kant's categorical imperative".
The half of the class who had been in my ethics course dissolved into laughter, and reassured him that
they had, indeed, read Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and were familiar with all three
imperatives. Ideally, we hope that our fourth year curriculum can sustain such connections between the
theoretical and the practical in a coherent and consistent fashion.
Poster/York - 10
Programmatic Learning Objectives
There are several different types of learning outcome at which PRWR aims, namely:
General skills: writing process, research, critical thinking/analysis (including informal logic),
ability to manipulate information by writing, rewriting, and editing (rewriting something
one did not write oneself), oral communication, visual rhtetoricetc
Applied skills: Periodical and book writing, book and periodical editing, proofreading, composing
for new media, oral presentation, etc.
Knowledge: history and theory of writing (including rhetoric, book history, orality/literacy
theory, etc.), genres of verbal artefacts, structure of language (linguistics), ethics of
writing, etc.
Applied knowledge: marketing, structure, procedure, and economics of book and magazine
publishing and writing, career opportunities, culture of writing (e.g. the etiquette of the
query letter, appropriate scope of editorial changes to manuscripts), and applied ethics
(use of sources, libel laws), etc.
Portfolio/Internships: By the end of the program, students should have assembled portfolios (hard
copy and web based) of their work, and possibly freelance or internship experience which
can be shown to potential employers.
Different courses emphasize different aspects of the overall program objectives. The first two years of the
program focus on building a foundation of general skills; applications of those skills and portfolio
development are introduced in third year.
First Year Courses
All students in PRWR take the same large first year courses, and many of the same second year courses,
all taught in lecture/tutorial format. The reasons for this are both pedagogical and practical. On a practical
level, large lecture courses offer several advantages: first they are cheaper to mount than seminars
Poster/York - 11
(Ontario has not been entirely exempt from the recent worldwide recession), second, they simplify issues
of prerequisites and progress through the program, and finally, they are relatively easy to staff (one can
rely on a small cadre of course directors and a larger cohort of relatively less experienced tutorial
instructors). The staffing issues are substantially more complex in Canada than they would be in the U.S.,
as York has no graduate program in rhetoric. Moreover, very few other Canadian institutions offer
degrees in areas related to rhetoric, and thus even the supply of tenure stream staff trained in writing
pedagogy is limited, and the available members of adjunct pools are, overwhelming, not specialists in
rhetoric or writing but instead trained in cognate fields (English, Linguistics, Communication and
Culture, Social and Political Thought), with practical experience as tutorial instructors. On a pedagogical
level, the uniformity of the early part of the curriculum allows third year instructors to make common
assumptions about things covered in prerequisite courses. An important side-effect is building community
– by third year, all students have been together in lectures and tutorials for long enough so that they bond
together as a sort of tribe; students from other programs who take our classes often comment enviously on
the sense of community, and PRWR students often comment about how much they value the relationships
they build with fellow students. This is especially prized given York's character as a large impersonal
urban commuter campus.
The courses students take in their first two years of PRWR are:
First Year:
Full Year: AP/EN 1700 (9 credits): Professional Writing: Process and Practice: This is the introductory
course for the Professional Writing Program. Throughout the academic term, it considers fiction
and non-fiction, including short stories, novels, memoirs, critical essays and reviews. The process
of writing is foregrounded, with emphasis on theories of composing, writer- and reader-based
prose, audience, voice, rhetoric and revision. The inter-relationship of critical reading, thinking
and writing is central to the course.
Fall term: EN1007 (3 credits): Rhetoric: An Historical Introduction. Covers how composition and
strategies of persuasion have been shaped by the evolution of literacy technologies (ideographic
writing, alphabetic writing, writing materials, etc.), the habits of literacy education, and the
practical uses of verbal skills in differing cultural contexts. Composition skills are taught in the
order in which they were originally invented. The skills sequence is taught synthetically with
techniques and ideas from each period supplementing rather than supplanting earlier material.
Students in this course 1. Understand outlines of major theories of rhetoric and their historical
Poster/York - 12
development; 2. Become familiar with seminal rhetorical texts which are foundational to the
discipline; 3. Understand how rhetoric and verbal skills are embedded in differing social and
technological contexts; and 4. Apply rhetorical theories to the practical task of writing.
Winter term: AP/EN 1006 (3 credits): Writer's Introduction to Literary Forms. Provides a brief
introduction to the principles governing the primary literary forms in English: lyric; dramatic; and
narrative (prose both fiction and non-fiction) and discusses also the complex relation between
form and genre, considering genres defined primarily by form (sonnet, ballad, etc), affect
(tragedy, comedy, melodrama), ambience or setting (pastoral, gothic) and topic (biography, etc.)
Students both read and write works in these genres.
Second Year:
AP/WRIT 2300 (3 credits): A Writer’s Introduction to Research
AP/EN 2710 (3 credits): Grammar and Proofreading
AP/EN 2720 (6 credits): Prose: Style and Argument
First year students at York all take "foundations" courses, nine credit full year courses meant to
introduce general critical thinking skills, and academic skills (research, writing, etc.) and conventions.
These courses are offered by individual departments or small clusters of departments, so that, while a
foundations course in math or social science always fulfills a student's foundations requirement and the
foundation requirement of a specific major, it will not count as the foundation of another major except by
specific permission, so that a student who changes major usually must take the foundation course of the
new major despite having satisfied the university wide foundation requirement (e.g. a statistics major who
moves into PRWR in her third year would still need to take EN 1700, even if she has already taken a
statistics foundations course).
EN 1700 began as a foundations course for the Humanities program, staffed by the Centre for
Academic Writing, and seats within increasingly allocated to PRWR, until it evolved into a pure PRWR
foundations course. It is the closest course in our curriculum to the United States conception of "first year
writing", and builds many of the same skills in writing process, critical reading, and academic writing
conventions (including use of sources), that one encounters in similar courses in the United States. For
many years, the course has been taught by Jan Rehner, author of several popular novels as well as writing
textbooks, and has incorporated successfully many practices characteristic of professional literary writing,
including readings and assignments which apply the techniques of fiction (and literary nonfiction) to
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academic writing. The course differs most dramatically from the United States model in not serving as a
service course for students outside our program.
EN 1007 assumes that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, i.e. that individuals learn rhetoric best
in the sequence in which rhetoric itself evolved. It begins with an analysis of orality/literacy differences
and the origins of writing (Mesopotamia, Homer), and moves through ethics of writing (Plato), types of
argument (Aristotle, ps.-Cicero, issue theory, etc.), arrangement (ps.-Cicero, medieval dictamen), style
(Erasmus), and external evidence and testimony (Whately). Writing assignments, like ancient
declamation, apply specific rhetorical techniques to imaginary problems, so that, for example, students
composed orations following a Ciceronian six part structure to argue for or against the candidacy of
Dracula in a recent Torontonian mayoral election held within a few days of Halloween (the consensus
was a campaign platform based on being tough on crime street crime – which he would tackle personally
– and increasing tourist revenue).
Synthesizing pedagogical strategies from English and Creative Writing, EN 1006 (originally
developed as a first year requirement for English, and later migrating to PRWR) focuses on issues of form
and genre, and emphasizes a pedagogy of imitation, in which the exemplary works students read become
models for generic and stylistic imitation. EN 1006 normally is taught in winter term in the same time slot
as the fall EN 1007 (Rhetoric) course, and is similar in offering cross-cultural and historical readings as
providing diverse resources for learning writing techniques, with the emphasis on argument and
arrangement in EN 1007 complemented by a focus on content and genre in EN 1006.
Much of the first year is designed to introduce skills and knowledge which are both expanded and
supplemented in subsequent years. Using EN 1007 (Rhetoric), as an example, the sections focused on
argument (ancient rhetoric, Whately on evidence and presumption), lead to the expanded discussion of
argument, and introduction of Toulmin and Perlman in 2720 (Prose), and the discussion of ethics (as
found in Plato and Aristotle) leads to a required fourth year ethics of writing course. Both 1006 (Literary
Forms) and 1007 (rhetoric) introduce style, which is approached in a more specifically technical fashion
in 2710 (grammar and proofreading) and in advanced (3rd and 4th year) courses on substantial and
copyediting. Research is introduced as a component of 1700 (Writing Process and Practice) but is the
subject of an entire second year course (2300) in the specific research techniques relevant to professional
writing and editing.
Poster/York - 14
The Way of the Beaver:
A Canadian Model of Honours Writing
The York PRWR program, as mentioned earlier, offers no ordinary, but only honours and
specialized honours degrees, and thus, by Canadian standards is what is traditionally described as an
honours program. Given, however, that the minimum GPA required to retain standing in the program is a
C+, even given moderately less grade inflation in Canada than the U.S., this does not constitute the sort of
small elite cadre with which those south of the border tend to associate the term "honours program".
Nonetheless, there are significant pedagogical consequences of PRWR being an honours degree.
Most importantly, because we do not offer ordinary degrees, a student who completes a few years
of the program, and loses honours standing (GPA falls under a C+), must transfer to a different major.
Although credit hours do transfer, PRWR courses are specific to our degree, and do not count towards
major requirements of ordinary degrees in other programs. Thus, students who fail to sustain an honours
GPA for PRWR would still need to take the first and second year courses specific to their new majors
(usually English or Communication), often adding a year or more to graduation time. Given the relative
difficultly and/or inefficiency of changing majors, it is actually more humane in the long run to weed out
marginal students in the first year than to let them advance to second or third year, leading the program to
advocate a significant degree of rigour in our first year curriculum. At the fourth year end of the program,
students are actively engaged in professional or quasi-professional editing or writing for student
newspapers, internships, freelance opportunities, or Leaping Lion Press (the York University press
founded to serve in part as an in-house internship for the PRWR program). In order to engage in such
activities successfully, students must write and edit at a high standard of competence (as often noted, the
second bad intern placed at a company is the last one they will accept from your program). These preprofessional pressures, strongly emphasized by an instructor cadre with extensive professional
experience, also nudge us in the direction of strong minimum standards for competency.
Although it does not define itself to catering for a small and talented elite, one might say that the
York PRWR program, like Lake Woebegone, is a place where all the students are above average. Rather
than a concept of honours as separating out students of extraordinary abilities, the Canadian honurs
degree requires a solid, but not necessarily brilliant, track record of incoming and ongoing students,
emphasizing diligence in steady progress through a curriculum with a relatively heavy and specialized
workload, rather than genius, in a manner ideally suited to the character signified by the symbolism of our
putatively industrious national aquatic rodent.
Poster/York - 15
Works Cited
Burrows, Montagu. Pass and Class. An Oxford Guidebook through the Courses of the Literae
Humaniores, Mathematics, Natural Science, and Law and Modern History. John Henry and James
Parker, 1860. [2nd ed. 1861, 3rd ed. 1866].
Poster, Carol. "Pedagogy and Bibliography: Aristotle's Rhetoric in Nineteenth Century England."
Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31:2 (2001): 5-35.
Stray, Christopher, ed. Classics in 19th and 20th century Cambridge: curriculum, culture and community.
Cambridge Philological Society Supplementary volume no.24, 1999.
---, ed. Oxford classics: teaching and learning, 1800-2000. London: Duckworth, 2007.
---. Classics transformed: schools, universities and society in England, 1830-1960 Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998.