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<p>What seemed to be the actual case when I was in high school many years ago was that all of the other subject teachers were willing to leave English writing instruction to the English literature courses. In other words, how to write well about history, science, etc. did not seem to be emphasized in those courses.</p>
<p>Is the lack of book reading in today’s society also partly at fault?</p>
<p>I had the usual writing and grammar lessons from a young age, and while I wrote at a pretty high level, writing without effort didn’t ‘click’ for me until my AP English course. I had a teacher who ripped your writing to shreds, but you learned from it. At the beginning of the year, she told us that if we let her teach us how to write, we’d never have issues in a college-level course because of our writing skills–she was right. To this day, I still get compliments on my writing skills, and it’s all because of her. I never wrote a paper that got lower than an A- in college because she forced us to learn content, clarity, and the usual grammar/editing skills. In my current position, most of my documents get a very surface-level review, and I’m the one tasked to edit most other documents since I catch the little things and bring them to a more professional level</p>
<p>That’s my point – lack of reading. I’ll try that strategy – rewrite to an A – and see if it changes my mind. So far, I haven’t found rewrites successful, and with 7 papers for 60 students it is a lot of work, but I could select one to use.</p>
<p>soccergurl7988,</p>
<p>I envy you. I wish I had a teacher who’d rip my writing apart.</p>
<p>Most teachers only made a few comments and then gave a grade. </p>
<p>Something that helped, though, was when they showed us excellent model papers.</p>
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<p>My daughter is an exceptional writer, and when I asked her where she thought her talent came from she attributed it to her lifelong love of reading. When she was a child we were one of the 15% of American families with no cable TV and have never had a high speed internet connection. I was shocked to learn from a teacher that many children come from families with not a single book in the house. Unless parents and educators can get kids to turn off the TV/computer/smart phone and pick up a book I think it’s going to be long time before the problem improves.</p>
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<p>No, I practiced for a few years, but have been a headhunter for many years. I read writing samples on a daily basis. Rather than seeing pithy advocacy pieces, I see claims that “it is clear” or “it is patently obvious” or “the argument is wholly without merit.” So many wasted and hollow words. I was a decent writer when I left college, but the partners I worked for at a law firm really taught me to write. Every word had to be there for a reason and had to add something to the facts, the law or the argument. Everything was edited multiple times. I’ll never forget the appearance of my first assignment that one partner critiqued. There was so much red ink, you could barely see what I had written.</p>
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<p>Except for the color, this reminds me on my first college paper. The teacher used yellow highlights and all I could see was a sea of yellow. The 2,500 words looked small next to 10 pages of comments added by the teacher. I learned quickly that the high school writing does not necessarily transfer well to the next level.</p>
<p>As an example, my younger sister and I experimented the differences. We asked our respective teachers to evaluate papers that had gone to the grading and reviewing cycle. The college professor returned the final paper after commenting on the first two pages only with the comment he got irritated and tired of removing all the extra punctuation, and especially all the superfluous commas. The high school AP English lady was equally displeased as she added a TON of commas and attempted to combine separate thoughts in lengthy sentences. She also was disappointed in the lack of “formal” structure. </p>
<p>Fwiw, this was the same teacher who used a older SAT test for her grammar class and found a way to contradict ETS on eight of ten questions.</p>
<p>All in all, as they say, YMMV! But what is more a fact than a speculation, nobidy is his or her right mind should ask a HS teacher to edit a college admission essay! ;)</p>
<p>I write in my job everyday… we have many layers of review before our work gets outside. That said, each layer of review makes a huge number of edits because they want it like THEY want it. You can delete entire paragraphs, and then later someone says “man, you really need a paragraph on X.” Sure… let me paste the paragraph from my draft from 3 weeks ago.</p>
<p>It definitely goes a bit overboard.</p>
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<p>While more people worldwide know how to read on a basic denotative level, there has been a very large decline in advanced literacy within the last 50 years. The average size and range of an educated person’s vocabulary and syntax have shrunk. All you have to do is look at grade-level verbal analyses of middlebrow journalism in the 40s and 50s versus today to see the glaring differences. Even elite students at elite institutions do not write as well as their counterparts did in the past. They don’t read very much at all partly because they don’t have the time. They are too busy polishing their ECs and swotting for their exams. Our culture does not reward activity that cannot be quantified and assessed by an outsider, and extensive reading is a private activity. At younger levels, kids now play video games for their narrative fix instead of reading stories.</p>
<p>It is impossible to teach a non-reader how to write well.</p>
<p>Interesting post, NJSue.</p>
<p>Out of curiosity, what are some of your favorite books? Feel free to throw out some names.</p>
<p>ThereseR, I pm’d you.</p>
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<p>Xiggi,</p>
<p>Why do you think that such elements are so rare in our present education system? </p>
<p>Also, how much of a role do you think that parents play?</p>
<p>Here is my anecdotal experience as a tutor at the local community college. We get a lot of bright kids who haven’t been as well educated as they could have been, and I have to say that working one on one with the kids has been truly rewarding.</p>
<p>I would say if a parent has a child who does not write as well as they could write by the time they get to college, the parent ought to suggest they take composition at the community college level, preferably the summer before they leave for college.</p>
<p>I have never seen better composition and writing teachers than at the community college level. The mission of the community colleges, at least in our state, is to teach the fundamentals very, very well, and the professors here do this and do it very well. </p>
<p>I think this is just a place where our community colleges, with the smaller classrooms, do much better, even than our flagship, and our flagship is well regarded, nationally. Everyone can learn to write better than they do, and these teachers do this very well across all skill levels.</p>
<p>I have taught writing at the university level, edited 120 books, wrote 11, and worked with executives on their writing skills (and writer’s block).</p>
<p>I teach that, with rare exceptions, good writing mimics speech. In almost every case of bad writing, I have seen students and adults so tied up in or traumatized by the mechanics of writing that they can’t get the words out. This is inevitably something caused by their school experiences, often in so-called “composition” classes.</p>
<p>Bad writing almost always stems from two causes: unclear thinking and too much attention to mechanics at the expense of expression. When the thought to be expressed is unclear, any one way to write it down is as good as any other. The expression problem is usually a result of putting the cart before the horse - working on mechanics rather than seeking one’s own voice. Mechanics should be dealt with separately, in my judgment - that’s what the editing process is. My kids watched me go through ten, eleven, twelve drafts of everything to be published, seeking the right expression, and then editing as I went.</p>
<p>Law schools treat legal writing instruction with contempt even though every legal employer agrees that it is the most important skill one can gain in law school. I’m not aware of any law school that grants tenure to its legal writing faculty or pays the legal writing faculty as much as doctrinal faculty. I hope someone will correct me if there’s an exception somewhere. Most schools use adjuncts, fellows, etc. for this function. Those folks may be better at the task than most tenure-track faculty, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re the help. An institution gives power and money to the folks whose work it values. This is the only true test of what matters to the institution.</p>
<p>Honestly, I think that people are unwilling to admit that–much like music or athletics–the ability to write well hinges heavily, although not exclusively, on innate ability. Of course, even people with exceptional innate skills benefit from good coaching and practice, but innately good writers are likely to excel and people with below average innate skill in writing may have a natural limit at “passable.” To me, writing well is almost a matter of tempo and rhythm–figuring out what flows well, what has the right “beat”–and I don’t know how you could teach that.</p>
<p>psych, I don’t disagree with you on the macro level, though I think it’s impossible to separate what’s <em>biologically</em> innate from skills developed through years of passive exposure. It’s obvious that people have different innate musical gifts, but it’s also pretty clear that people steeped in music from birth will almost always emerge competent. The same goes for folks (like me) who had good conversation and good books on an IV drip during all our waking hours from infancy on. The only time we can really untangle that is with geniuses like Lincoln, Dickens and Richard Wright, who became great writers despite a deprived environment.</p>
<p>It doesn’t really matter, though, because the challenge of teaching an incompetent teenager to write doesn’t turn on the cause of the incompetence. Getting everyone to “passable” would be huge progress in my book.</p>
<p>mythmom said:
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<p>Apparently we will lie in proximate graves. ;)</p>
<p>It can be both observed and empirically proven that there is an interdependent relationship between reading and writing. :)</p>
<p>Are we talking about poor writing as in “the message of this paper is muddled and unclear” or as in “horrible grammar and mechanics”? Or both?</p>
<p>I went to the University of Washington, which is generally well-thought of, and in one class we did peer reviews of papers. I was STUNNED by the horrible mechanics of the papers I was reviewing. Misspellings, sentence fragments, and tense changes all over the place. And from native English speakers, too. (I could understand if they had been wrestling with an unfamiliar language, but no.) WRETCHED use of citations as well. As in, there often weren’t any, even when the student was obviously quoting someone.</p>
<p>I do think that kids who read a lot have an advantage when it comes to writing. If you see the same pattern repeated often enough, you’ll begin to subconsciously recognize it. And the books don’t have to be “highbrow literature” to have a positive effect. Any book that had an editor should follow the basic rules of grammar. I mostly read fantasy and sci fi novels as a kid.</p>