From Chronicle: Why Many Students and Academics Have Poor Writing Skills

Parents Forum
1

<p>This Chronicle article explores the reasons for the middling writing skills found across academia:</p>

<p>Why</a> We Can't Farm Out the Teaching of Writing - Do Your Job Better - The Chronicle of Higher Education</p>

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What many people overlook is that teaching first-year writing is a challenging task. When universities farm responsibility for that course out to graduate students—who have no real training in writing and have not had the benefit of being published (and edited), are overwhelmed trying to keep up with their own coursework, and are given only rudimentary instruction in how to teach—well, it's often not a good experience for anyone.</p>

<p>And since there's little room in most graduate curricula to focus on writing, many future faculty members simply never learn. The truth is, everyone thinks whoever went before him or her was responsible for the job of teaching writing: College instructors believe students learned the mechanics in high school; graduate advisers assume their students learned as undergraduates what they needed to know about style and argumentation.

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<p>What do you think of this article? Does it align with your personal experience?</p>

<p>And what suggestions do you have for improving writing instruction at all levels?</p>

2

<p>I teach first year writing, among many other things. Our college runs 200 sections of Comp I and almost as many of Comp II every semester. Every person teaching feels adequate to the task and feels that writing is a crucial skill. Most of have been published, but I doubt any of us feel that editorial comments were our path to clear, fluid writing. Our teachers and professors saw to that, and the rigors of carefully combed PhD theses ensured our skills.</p>

<p>I agree that writing must be taught face- to-face, almost one-on-one, even in a classroom setting. As the article subtly suggests, thinking clearly and writing clearly are braided together and must be simultaneously addressed.</p>

<p>However, I will go to my grave insisting that for most students copious reading is a prerequisite to good writing. I think that ship has sailed, but we will continue to do what we can.</p>

3

<p>There are also stylistic preferences that different people (instructors and students) have. Readers of different subjects may also have different expectations on what writing style they consider “good”. These differences can make evaluation of someone’s writing skills less consistent.</p>

<p>An example that sometimes comes up is the math/science focused high school student who writes in correct English, but very concisely and precisely in a way that his/her English teachers do not like.</p>

4

<p>I am on my third kid to attend high school and I am amazed at the difference in how the last is being taught. The first two went to fine schools but weren’t really taught the art and process of writing. The second had natural talent and actually got a job writing in high school as a result of which she had the great benefit of professional editing. She got off and running in college with no problems, while unfortunately her sister struggled with college writing as a freshman.</p>

<p>My son is a freshman in high school and the school works from the premise that writing must be taught comprehensively beginning the summer before freshman year. They begin teaching MLA formatting along with the summer reading and writing is included in every class, including gym. I would always have said my son was a big reader but poor writer, but the approach of having writing assignments at all times that include very clear and direct corrections has been a Godsend to him because he didn’t have to know things like how to cite, how to introduce quotes, how to create an annotated bibliography. He was taught how to do those things and given guidance and correction in getting it right. I have seen incredible advances in his writing this year, I only wonder why it isn’t more of a priority in other places.</p>

5

<p>We do like that as long as there is evidentiary proof for large statements and transitions between ideas so readers can follow the writer’s train of thought.</p>

<p>I don’t really think there are too many criteria for good writing beyond clarity. We English profs have catholic taste, all the way from Henry James to Ernest Hemingway to Charles Darwin. I do teach VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE.</p>

<p>I also do my own work at the boundary between science and literature.</p>

<p>Furthermore, I have edited writing at the dissertation level in social sciences, hard sciences, and the humanities. The same rules apply, although the foci and formats certainly do vary.</p>

6

<p>I teach writing as well, and the key to good writing – at any level – is rewriting.</p>

<p>Personally, I am comforted that my high school freshman’s advanced English class writes 8-10 papers over the year, different genres, from literary analysis to personal reflections. Each draft is peer-reviewed according to a specific rubric, and then is re-written and graded and commented-upon – in detail – by the teacher. They are learning all the techniques I rely on – learning to critique our own work by evaluating choices others have made, revising to address comments, and then getting more comments.</p>

<p>I see it in my college freshman’s process as well. He recently had a paper in an intermediate Honors section – they submitted a draft, met with a writing fellow assigned to their section, revised and resubmitted for final grade. </p>

<p>It is time intensive but this generation can do it. As adults in their lives, we need to insist on the process. Then again, I understand the undergrad prof who evaluates soundness of reasoning, analysis. If the student cannot articulate his or her arguments effectively, most campuses these days have well-staffed writing centers that undergrads should take advantage of.</p>

7

<p>Why do you think that so many young people have lackluster writing skills?</p>

<p>Are they not doing enough writing? Enough reading?</p>

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<p>Writing teachers don’t like precise? In what universe?</p>

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<p>Well, the fact that a teacher is not liking “precise and concise” writing might represent the basic problem.</p>

<p>Fwiw, precise and concise is a real positive. Short and incoherent, which might be a lot closer to what is produced by the typical math/science focused student, is quite different. </p>

<p>The reality is pretty simple. Teaching good writing skills is a time consuming affair that requires not only adequate training and prior education but also an immense dedication. Elements that are hardly present in our K-12 system.</p>

<p>Expecting colleges to reverse more than a decade of inattention is too tall an order. Only a handful of colleges are keen to tackle the issue with adequate staffing and resources.</p>

10

<p>No one ever taught me to write. I read a lot, and taught myself. They did teach me grammar, however, and from 5th - 8th grades I had three or four writing assignments a week, with occasional long papers starting in 6th grade. So I had lots of practice. And everything I wrote was pretty much flyspecked by my teachers.</p>

<p>Both my kids read a lot, too. The older one read The Diary Of Anne Frank when she was 10, and immediately started writing all the time, to teach herself to write. She got very fluid very fast, with the perverse result that her teachers stopped bothering to teach her anything, because she was always operating way above grade level. From 5th grade on, she really only had two teachers who made an effort to get her to improve – a very young woman on her way to graduate school, who taught her in 7th grade, and a retired teacher she had for one quarter in 10th grade. I was generally shocked at the low quality of the comments she would get on papers she happened to let me see – grammatical faults and misspellings not noted, logical gaps missed, stuff like that.</p>

<p>When she got to college, she had a lot of trouble adapting herself to more formal academic writing, and learning to take criticism. But writing is her meal ticket – she has a great job now, that she basically got by having the best writing sample among the qualified candidates.</p>

<p>Her brother was never a fluid writer; he always struggled a bit. They actually got roughly the same grades in high school from the same teachers, but for completely different reasons. My daughter would sometimes get graded harshly when her teachers (accurately) guessed she hadn’t given an assignment her full effort. “This kid can make me cry, and I’m not crying, so she must have blown this paper off.” Her brother would manage expectations carefully, always saving his best for last, producing the reaction “I am such a good teacher! Look at how much progress this kid has made since the beginning of the term.” When he got to college, he had a great relationship with his writing course TA – a Divinity student who had never really taught before, and had only rudimentary instruction in how to teach writing. No matter. He was a great writing teacher, and helped my son a lot.</p>

<p>Actually, my daughter’s best writing teacher in college was also a grad student, a woman who had gone to the same school she went to for 11 years back home, although they were seven years apart and had never known one another. They had a class together when my daughter was a first-year and the woman was a second-year PhD student, and they became friends. My daughter had terrible luck with faculty advisors, but this grad student was a helpful mentor throughout college, and she wound up as the “preceptor” for my daughter’s honors thesis three years later.</p>

11

<p>I’ve always heard that old saw about rewriting, and I don’t find it especially true. Just had the very first draft of a paper accepted for publication.</p>

<p>I’ve also found that students’ often revise papers by taking out offending material without improving the overall paper so papers get shorter and shorter.</p>

<p>I encourage outlines and planning before they start to right. I also keep a sheet with frequent errors and reward them when a particular error no longer appears. I find that this produces better results.</p>

<p>I would never have earned a PhD in English if I’d had to focus on grammar or do rewrites of something I already felt done with. There’s always a future paper to improve.</p>

<p>And yes, it’s very labor intensive I spend more time grading papers than I do in the classroom. I also learn the name of every student so that my comments are really part of a dialogue.</p>

12

<p>I can tell you that many young lawyers have poor writing skills. I have seen the deterioration over the years. Fifteen years ago, I rarely saw a poor writing sample from a lawyer who graduated from a top law school. Now, I rarely see one that I would have accepted as an attorney. I can barely stand to read them and would love to re-write most of them.</p>

13

<p>If you are a good enough planner, and have enough experience, rewriting may not be necessary. I find, however, a lot of the time, I really don’t know what I think until I start getting it down on paper. At the end of my first draft, I tend to know a lot more and to be thinking much more clearly than I did when I started. So then what I sometimes do – and what I tell students I have coached on writing to try – is to take the concluding paragraph of the first draft, make it the opening paragraph, and re-write the whole thing, this time knowing where you want to go.</p>

14

<p>cartera45,</p>

<p>Are you a partner at a law firm?</p>

15

<p>Cartera is right about lawyers. That is why there is an entire legal writing industry and almost all large law firms have permanent consultants who give seminars and provide mentoring.</p>

16

<p>The most recent associate my firm hired came right out of a local trial court clerkship (which is unusual for us – usually we like to hire people with 2-4 years of large firm experience). Wow, what a pleasant surprise he has been! He’s in fact quite a good writer, very thoughtful about it, and willing to go toe-to-toe with a partner to defend his own choices or to tear down the partner’s.</p>

17

<p>Students are different, but for many of mine, telling them expect to rewrite their paper helps them get started. Otherwise they tend to waste a lot of time obsessing about whether they are doing it the right way and don’t make any progress at all. Also, it is a lot easier for me to discuss a concrete text, no matter how unpolished, than a vague plan.</p>

18

<p>Our public high schools, in general, do a terrible job of teaching writing. The emphasis has been on math and science, and writing has taken a back seat for many years.
The main reason I sent my son to a private high school is basically for the writing instruction. I was tired of seeing superficial, poorly constructed papers come home with As and A+ all through middle school. Meanwhile, my daughter was attending the private high school as a freshman and getting the kind of writing instruction that midwestmomofboys describes.
My son is proof that “this generation can do it.” I saw a huge improvement, even after the first year. By graduation, writing was one of his strengths. I’ve always considered poor writing indicative of poor thinking, and it was worth the expense for our family to ensure that both kids finished high school being able to write well. I just wish most students could have the same kind of preparation before college. </p>

<p>My Dd graded freshman papers in her social science field as a Harvard grad student and commented several times she didn’t see how these kids were admitted with such lousy writing skills. Writing courses are not required at most colleges, so if students don’t learn in high school, they often don’t learn at all.</p>

19

<p>My older son became a pretty good writer thanks to a high school English teacher who took the first assignment on summer reading and made them rewrite until they had an A paper. I think it took my son three drafts and at the end of it all, he had a much better idea of what expectations were. Not just the five paragraph essay! He still hates writing.</p>

<p>Younger son was always a more fluid writer, with a good ear for dialog, but his academic papers were often way too colloquial. One of the reasons he signed up for AP Euro was the teacher has the reputation for being the best writing teacher in the school. He had them write all sorts of different papers, including an art history type analysis of a painting. He always had lots of comments, not so much on grammar, but on the structure of the paper and the strength of the arguments. I felt my son was pretty well prepared for college - and indeed he’s done well on papers in general, though he was told to work on comma splices in freshman English comp. </p>

<p>S2, like me, tends to write a general outline, then the entire paper, and then with that in hand figure out what he really wanted to say, which may just involve some tweaks, but sometimes involves starting all over. Sort of what Anne Lamott calls sloppy first drafts. I don’t think there’s one right formula, I think everyone has to work out what works for them.</p>

<p>I had to write a few papers with people in grad school - and it was painful how poorly some of them wrote. Interestingly the best writer had been a photographer for several years before going to grad school.</p>

<p>Unfortunately most teachers haven’t been taught to write very well. The AP Euro guy had a PhD.</p>

<p>DH learned to write from his PhD advisor who had them write and rewrite papers until they were as short and clear as possible. I actually often have him read my stuff, because he really is a very good editor now.</p>

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<p>I agree with moonchild. My sense is that the more STEM subjects are valued, the more humanities subjects, including writing, are devalued. My D is in a private school and even there, the demands in English and history classes are low and writing levels abysmal. It carries over to the sciences where my D says that very smart kids don’t understand what should and should not be included in a lab report and struggle with conveying information in a clear and understandable manner.</p>