922 Te Journal of American History March 2021 doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaaa463 © Te Author 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. Tinking beyond the Essay: Varieties of Student Historical Writing Laura M. Westhof and Robert D. Johnston “Why they can’t write” is not just the title of a recent book on college writing by a vet- eran composition instructor; it also seems to be the lament of every history instructor at some point in their careers. Te ubiquity of such complaints—along with the glaring absence of research on historical writing coming from historians themselves—prompted this year’s Textbooks and Teaching section. 1 We have each wrestled with our own versions of the lament. We fortunately have also had our own epiphany when we realized that the question “why can’t they write” can be terribly unhelpful. For Laura Westhof, that realization came years ago when she was team teaching a frst-year history and composition course with a colleague from the English department at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Troubled about how woefully un- derprepared students were to do “real college-level writing,” she saw nothing but defcits. In challenging contrast, the composition instructor saw plenty of intellectual risk taking, and interesting ideas buried in messy prose. “Were we even reading the same essays,” she wondered. One particular student was bedeviling. Although Westhof quickly judged her a poor writer who would struggle to succeed in college, the coteacher found much to admire in the student’s search for voice and her ill-formed but curious questions. Setting aside her initial impulse to nitpick every writing error, Westhof learned from her colleague. To- gether they encouraged the student’s ideas and interests; her writing improved and her engagement in the class deepened. Each subsequent semester, the student stopped in to visit with Westhof. Four years later she graduated after completing a double major and a minor, interning on political campaigns, studying abroad, and winning election to the homecoming court in recognition of her campus involvement. Nothing in that student’s Laura M. Westhof is a professor of history and chair of the Department of History at the University of Missouri– St. Louis. Readers may contact Westhof at westhof@umsl.edu. Robert D. Johnston is a professor of history and the director of the Teaching of History Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Readers may contact Johnston at johnsto1@uic.edu. 1 John Warner, Why Tey Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities (Baltimore, 2020). For a bibliography of articles on writing in history courses, see “Bibliography: Writing Historically,” n.d., His- tory SOTL: Te International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History, https://histsotl.sitehost .iu.edu/blog/?page_id=36. Te History Teacher, published by the Society for History Education, is an additional resource. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/107/4/922/6157157 by guest on 13 March 2021