by Andrea Scott
I teach writing, but I don’t write. My article published in the last issue of CEA Forum opens with a version of this statement. It was a running joke circulated among colleagues in a writing program where I taught for several years. Of course, it wasn’t true. We all had writing projects in progress, but there were stretches of time when, given curricular requirements, most of our intellectual energy was dedicated to responding to student writing. If you measured by output, you’d find we were wildly prolific during those weeks. Each academic year every full-time faculty member composed on average five-hundred double-spaced pages of comments on student drafts and revisions—a sum worthy of a scholarly monograph. Yet, as I explore in my piece, the reasons for delayed disciplinary writing in such contexts can be quite complex.
