Cultural variations in writing not only refer to differences across countries but across schooling systems as well. When I began college, I was lost. A first generation college student, I had limited guidance in what I could expect from the college culture. I had become accustomed to doing well in my classes at the high school level with a great amount of assistance and support; College introduced a different world to me. Suddenly I went from being at the top of my class to the bottom of my game. I started to become more aware of what I didn’t know and less able to incorporate what I did. Nothing hit this home for me more than writing. As Russell and Foster point out, the expectations at the secondary level and the expectations at the college level have a wide gap between them. It is as though students are expected to know how to ride a bike without ever having anyone assist them in balancing without training wheels; there’s no one to hold the back of the bike.

I started college never having used a semicolon and with no idea how I might go about it; I thought a comma indicated where the reader should take a breath or pause, and like Anne, I had never heard the term thesis before. Needless to say, it was quite a culture shock for me. In the culture I had come from, the emphasis was on being able to write well for an ELA exam. Teachers were more concerned with their students mastering the five paragraph essay than the mechanics of writing. I enrolled myself in an introductory writing course, but was hesitant because I felt as though I didn’t need the class; I had gotten straight A’s in high school, wasn’t that class for people who flunked out?

My misperceptions about the introductory writing course are reflective of the ideas Fox discusses. The stigma surrounding the course was incorrect; it ended up being one of the most intellectually stimulating and challenging courses I took. While I wasn’t victim of writing standards that disregarded my cultural values like the African American students Fox references, I was a victim of writing standards that differed from high school to college. I was fortunate to attend a college where the program was less concerned with serving the university and more concerned with serving the students; two professors taught the course each semester and both chose their own textbook, their own syllabi, and their own guidelines. One of my “textbooks” was The New York Times. The professors were able to do this because it was a private college, had I attended a state school, I’m sure the situation would have been quite different.

The requirements the state colleges place on students is especially irritating to me. When I tutor students in the writing center they express frustrations with things like the WPST and the writing portfolio requirement that is graded by someone other than their instructor. How are such forms of assessment benefitting these students? How do they benefit the teachers? In my opinion they don’t. They restrict teachers in flexing their creative muscles and put students back into the same practice they became familiar with in high school—writing for an exam. It’s no wonder that so many students despise writing and struggle with it.