Miguel Duarte

Professor Masha Fedorova

Writing 2

June 08 2019

Writing and First-Generation Students

First-generation college students are thrown into the gates of writing as soon as they

begin their college career. It is a test of skill and courage. Writing is the interdisciplinary “gate”

that never fails to keep disciplines like the arts, history, language and literature alive and

consistently passed onto others. More importantly, writing protects the identity of those like first-

generation students and by doing so it proves time and time again that writing is the path to many

students’ identities. Literary works like Theron Snell’s “First Generation Students, Social Class,

and Literacy” and Jessica Early’s “Mi’ja You Should Be a Writer” prove that writing is the key

to success in many disciplines despite many challenges in issues like social class, parental

influences, and social environment. These literary works differ greatly in their usage of diverse

approaches, including writing strategies, to approach this topic. Most discourses around first-

generation college students are typically concerned with class and authors make sure to

emphasize that throughout the works. While Snell and Early’s works are on the same topic of

first-generation students in writing, they manage to present it in their own ways, according to

their content, their style and organizational choices, and their usage of evidence.

Most discourses around that of first-generation students typically involve social class, or

lack thereof. Both Early and Snell strongly believe that writing is the pathway to success. Good

writing skills means having the ability to convey a message. When it comes to that of social class

many first-generation students find themselves disadvantaged because as Kenny Smith, a

Writing Program professor at UCSB, said in an interview, “In a lot of middle class and upper-

class families they have parents that went to college and that understand what is going on. I think

that is a big challenge for a lot of people is just understanding the system and how it works”

(Personal Communication, May 13, 2019). Most of the time, those students that are not first

generation typically find their parents doing a lot of planning for them thus leading to social class

playing a huge role in writing skills. First-generation students need to learn writing to assure

themselves that they would reach the gatekeeper as Jessica Early states to “have a continued

success in college and in the work-place” (Early 278). Reaching this goal would mean being up

to par with those already advantaged, especially when understanding genres and the writers

intended perspective of things.

When comparing Snell’s and Early’s literary works, you can easily see their perspectives

differ. Theron Snell’s work is written from his own perspective as an academic adviser who

teaches at a small regional university. He hopes to look at the concerns of his colleagues who

have worried about first-generation college students and the academic and social challenges

these students face. Furthermore, he wants to help ensure that these students can succeed. On the

other hand, Jessica Early’s perspective is that of a researcher who utilizes a third person view to

provide impartial analysis of the problem. Both writers use reliable and sufficient sources to back

their claims, Snell’s approach also tends to maintain a personal connection between himself, his

own study, and his reasoning behind it. This helps maintain a relationship with the reader and

shows that he seems to care about what he is studying and wants to provide data, opinions, and

inputs on his findings. This helps the way he structures and organizes his work in columns

almost as if it was a newspaper article that made headlines, which in turn helps readers get a

sense of being informed. Early’s style is that of a formal research study, and thus her literary
work contains an introduction, subtitles for her arguments, research questions, tables, data,

analysis of that data, a conclusion and more. The audience for Early plays a huge role in how

evidence and claims are presented in her research. Presumably, Early is trying to reach out to an

audience that are most likely specialists and researchers. Due to this, her study is very dense and

impersonal with all her claims heavily backed by multiple sources as evidence, most if not all

peer reviewed and official. On the other hand, Snell aims his attention towards professors,

teachers, and any other educational professionals. He uses his personal connections and

experiences along with statistics to explain and back up how and what he observed from his

students. When working with evidence, Early and Snell differ mainly in how they go about

supporting arguments.

The evidence that Early and Snell make differs mainly in part due to their analysis of the

situation. Early uses peer-reviewed or journals and published work as evidence after every claim

that she makes. Snell tends to make claims from personal experience and backs it up with

statistical data as evidence. Both of their works are kept very Academic and formal, although

Early and her study required formality due to it being a full-on study of first-generation students.

Snell on the other hand proceeds to keeping it formal yet giving his opinion and take on things

along the way. Snell throughout his literary work constantly makes points, cites his sources,

gives data, and even puts out an anecdote or two. One example is when he talks about working in

universities and the impacts of the social environment and first-generation students that he had

observed there (Snell 28). Moreover, he chooses to include data in big bold text in the middle of

the column to draw the readers’ attention to information that some may feel boring but necessary

to his argument. Snell utilizes this as a “speed bump” to keep the audience hooked onto his

findings and paying attention to the information that he conveys.

 In conclusion, both Early and Snell focus on the importance of literacy for these students

and furthermore the impacts that social class may hold when concerning first-generation

students’ success. Moreover, the content they presented was enhanced by their organizational

methods that they were able to implement into their work as well as the style that they held that

made it their own. While evidence differed, they used their evidence to support every claim they

made in a way that their intended audience was able to pick up, understand, and connect the

pieces to said claims. Thus both Jessica Singer Early and Theron Snell help provide the

information and evidence needed to prove the importance of writing as a discipline, whether you

are a first-generation student or not.

 Works Cited

Early, Jessica Singer. ""Mi'ja, You Should Be a Writer": Latino Parental Support of Their First-
Generation Children." Bilingual Research Journal 33.3 (2010): 277-91. Web.

Smith, Kenny. Personal interview. 13 May 2019.

Snell, Theron P. “First-Generation Students, Social Class, and Literacy.” Academe, vol. 94, no.
4, 2008, pp. 28–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40253218.