In engineering school I was shocked to see how bad the average writing quality was among engineers. Too many people fetishize STEM talent as if important secondary skills are not just as important to doing real work.
Among mathematicians, some are good some are bad. Proofs require some pretty substantial writing proficiency but not everyone is good at writing proofs either.
Say what? Substantiating and using quotes doesn’t make bad writing. It is absolutely necessary for good argumentative writing, which is what most college writing requires. Any genre can be done badly as described, but run-ons and badly used quotes are just that–bad writing.
I’m pretty sure that ALL freshman comp classes emphasize argument based on evidence. It’s standard.
(signed–freshman comp instructor for over 30 years).
Well, correcting your children is one thing, but friends? Over the line, to me, especially since–as I wrote above–conventions of SWE do not extend to common spoken language, which is far less prone to dangerous ambiguity as it is accompanied by gesture, tone, and facial expression.
@MurphyBrown – I think we can agree that using evidence and quote is not the problem itself; it is HOW WELL they use them, and write in general. I am a bear about run-ons, but if it’s ingrained in a student’s habits, it’s almost impossible to get them to stop. (I’m assuming that by “run-ons” you mean grammatically incorrect sentences, not simply very long ones.)
I think you’ll find fairly mediocre writing in every major–we teach them what we can, but one or two semesters does not turn everyone into George Orwell, that’s for sure. 
I teach grammar and I say that sometimes–my social milieu uses a great deal of slang and colloquial language. So while I agree with you that people should know the conventions of SWE, I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with speaking in ways that violate those conventions. With apologies to J. Joplin, “feeling good is good enough for me / Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee”… 
But you know the difference, marvin. And some of us who make errors on CC posts can master proper writing IRL. Fwiw, I’ve corrected my kids’ friends, but not on their speaking.
Like I said, I’m fine with correcting kids (& maybe some kids’ friends, I guess, if I knew them well).
Let’s just say that it’s easier to make mistakes when you’re quickly typing up a response on a forum than when you’re writing a formal document where errors are removed through a more rigorous and cumbersome revision process.
Haha yeah–im prety surre none of us would wan’t our post’s to be judgd by the standrds of formle riting!
Writing is a craft profession, just like blacksmithing. The kid must apprentice with a master for a time to begin to learn the craft. Then the kid must practice, practice, practice, practice.
Here is my story. One of the assignments in 8th grade English class was a monthly book report. Read a book – any book – and produce a multiple page report by the end of the month. Challenging assignment for me as my writing skills were poor. Dad intervened and imposed mandatory book report editing review sessions on weekends. I have painful memories of these sessions. Dad was a master craftsman with the written word, but he never wrote anything for me. I had to write it, and then he would help me edit. Slowly I learned how to edit on the weekends with Dad. It took the entire year to begin to learn the skill of editing. I entered 9th grade with better writing and editing skills, and the English classes throughout high school emphasized writing, writing, writing, and more writing. For example, in addition to all the other English class assignments, each student had to keep a writing journal which was graded based on volume of writing. You had to put something in that **** journal at least every other day. By senior year in high school I was good enough at writing to become an NCTE Finalist. But it all goes back to those 8th grade weekend editing sessions with Dad.
There are excellent advices given here. But when I started this thread I thought talent was more influential than I’d give it that much weight now.
I heard the term “deliberate practice” multiple times lately and started to see its importance. If you google Anders Ericsson several authors pushing the concert pop up. Here is an old article I just heard: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07wwln_freak.html
I think “deliberate practice” needs expert feedback, like RustyTrowel’s dad. Practice writing by oneself isn’t effective. I guess people agree.
Hmm, certainly a good reader helps, but as I remember Stephen King’s memoir, he did the practice, practice, practice method. He filled the nail by his desk with rejections and then went and bought a spike. He was published before he filled the spike.
In my experience, a factor that contributes to becoming a good writer is receiving detailed critiques from an accomplished writer.
I was a reasonable writer in high school, because I read a lot. But, I don’t recall much teacher feedback on my writing. (It wasn’t a particularly good school.) I became a better writer in college journalism classes and late-night copy editing sessions for the college newspaper (printed–so real deadlines). In both cases, the professor or editor-in-chief would take a red pen or the computer equivalent to any writing that could be improved. Seeing ink flow like blood over my work was a big motivator.
My son seems to have become a good writer, and he attributes it mainly to his 5th grade teacher. They did a biweekly reading response journal. The main criteria was to respond in some way beyond summarizing the content. The teacher promised to write a critique as long as the student’s entry. My son strove to get entirely positive responses, but the teacher was critical enough that this happened rarely. We came to know the teacher’s family after that year, and learned that they hired sitters so that he would have time for this extensive grading. His “report cards” were a 1-2 page narrative about how the student was doing and what improvements were possible.
However, since 5th grade, my son hasn’t had any teachers who provided detailed feedback. In fact, he’s has some teachers who didn’t even seem to read papers before assigning grades. (Reasonably good public school, but better in STEM than humanities.) On a recent paper for AP Lit, the teacher spent ~5 minutes individually with most students telling them how to improve. The only feedback for my son was “This is good.” When he asked, “How can I improve?” the teacher responded, “I can’t think of anything.” He put the paper off and pulled an almost all-nighter, so I seriously doubt there was nothing to improve in a 10-page paper.
Anyone knows where to find people who can give detailed critiques like that for a middle schooler? I suspect my kid won’t ever see that from his teachers before college. I think it’s worth the investment now and it may be more useful than piano lessons. I’d imagine some writers or retired teachers want to do it, but my googling came up with no lead.
Blood is a very old fashion kind of commentary.
Current pedagogy helps the student discover how to revise. Blood corrects one paper, but if you want students to develop the skills they need to write the next paper in the next genre in the next discipline, then they need help figuring out what works as well as what doesn’t and why. They need to learn to read their own papers for structure. They need to see how a reader interprets their arguments (“your claim is X and the evidence is Y, but what about my counter-argument z”).
Furthermore most students have trouble incorporating too much feedback into a revision. So with a middle schooler, I would summarize my reading of the paper, say here are 3 things I like and two things to work on, and then ask them to describe how they will revise the paper. More is not always better.
This is a question I grapple with every day as a new first-year writing teacher and a graduate student of composition and rhetoric. I know how FYC courses came about back in the day (starting at Harvard and used primarily to perfect grammar), and I think about what students actually do with their writing skills now and how to help them realize what they do with it.
I’m still fleshing out all of my theories, but I really believe in learning from “failure” (however soft or hard you want to use the term). Some of my biggest breakthrough moments in life were when I failed at something and learned from it. What I was doing clearly wasn’t working, so I had to adjust and try something else. I had my students write about this for one of their essay assignments last semester, and they really liked it. I also didn’t paint writing as good vs. bad but experienced vs. less experienced. So I guess I also emphasize practice as well as trial and error.
“Anyone knows where to find people who can give detailed critiques like that for a middle schooler?”
@eiholi Since the service you are looking for doesn’t exist, it will have to be brought into existence. The question is how to find qualified labor. Ideally, you also want someone who makes at least part of their living in the tutoring business. Given that, I would suggest the following steps:
First do some searches for providers of tutoring services on the SAT II Subject Tests in your local area. You don’t want the SAT or the ACT, you want the SAT II Subject Tests. The reason I suggest this approach is based on what I observed about the structure of the tutoring market for my D when she was preparing for and taking her college admissions tests. I thought it odd that most of the big name tutoring companies (e.g., Kaplan) had very few offerings when it came to the Subject Tests. One of the ways that the world has changed in recent years is that relatively few students are now studying for and taking the SAT II Subject Tests. Generally, it is the students targeting the elite schools who are taking these tests. Because of the declining market demand for the subject tests, the big brand name testing companies have largely ceded the subject test tutoring field to the small local independents. So, in my case, when I went out to find a class for Math L2 Subject Test prep for my D, what I found was that I had to hire a specialist tutor.
Then, what I also found was that the best tutors had affiliated themselves with very small, local boutique providers of tutors who serviced the Subject Test market (among other tutoring niche markets). Now, you aren’t looking for Subject Test tutoring, I get that. But you are looking for a multiple degreed English major who (for whatever reason) needs a sideline. I found these small boutiques to be very quality conscious. So, the technique I am recommending is to identify these small local boutique firms (there will not be many) and then identify the owners/principals of these firms. Then, you get on the phone with these owners/principals and describe what you are looking for. They will be the ones who know the labor side of the equation in your local market well enough to find the right tutor for you. Paradoxically, I would start the search for your English tutor looking for a Math L2 Subject Test tutor who happens to be affiliated with one of these small boutiques in your local area. There is enough demand for tutoring for that Math L2 test that these local tutoring boutiques are going to be playing in that marketplace. You can probably identify these boutiques by searching online, and then you just follow the trail.