Did your school teach you to write effectively?

College Search & Selection
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<p>The question posed by this thread came up on another thread about the quality of undergraduate business education. Some posters remarked that some employers might prefer to hire liberal arts major because at least they can write well; another poster took issue with this. </p>

<p>Most students, whether in liberal arts, business, or engineering, are required to pass a writing course (freshman composition or expository writing, or similar courses). Many schools now attempt to build on these introductory courses to focus on "writing across the curriculum". My question to you is, did these courses do a good job of teaching you to write more effectively? What was your experience in these courses?</p>

<p>Back in the stone age, when I attended a so-called "top 15" university, I can say that the writing instruction left a lot to be desired; it was assumed apparently that we should already know how to write well. An overworked English grad student taught my course. About the only thing I can remember about it is that we read anthology of essays, which apparently we were to emulate. Though I liked several of the essays, I don't think we had much actual writing instruction. </p>

<p>In contrast to my experience, my daughter, who attends a public flagship, is taking an excellent required expository writing course. She already was a fluid and clear writer, who had rigorous English courses in high school. Though she expected to learn little from her current course, she was pleasantly surprised that it improved her writing even more. On each writing assignment, she has individual and group conferences on each successive draft. She gets extensive verbal and written feedback using clear standards and criteria. Each writing assignment must go through several revisions until it's near perfect. Her course is taught by a PhD, not a TA, and it is conducted through the university's writing program, not through the English Dept. </p>

<p>It would be interesting to hear others' experiences in freshman comp, expository writing, "writing across the curriculum," or even, business communication (for business majors) or technical communication (for engineers).</p>

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<p>The quotation below provides a good example of the way many people were taught to write. The quote is from an interview with sociologist Andrew Abbott that was published in the Chicago Maroon (11/30/10):
“I do a lot of ethnographic writing where students write stuff for me without any name on it, and say who taught them how to write and how they learned to write. That’s how I discovered last year that a fair number of students entering the University of Chicago think that all essays must have five paragraphs. The reason they write long, amorphous paragraphs is that, as people ask them to write longer and longer papers, they still keep to five paragraphs. So the paragraphs get longer and longer, and it’s really strange. That turned out to be extremely useful. It turned out to be great news to everybody when I talked about it in the Core staff meeting. Nobody had actually ever thought of, “Well, let’s just ask them how they’ve been taught to write so far.””</p>