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Some Thoughts About Our Poor Writing Skills (and a personal thank you)
I began my blog about four months ago, because I love politics and I think it's a great way to keep one's ideas focused. Today, I am proud to say I completed my 300th post and reached more than 5,000 hits in the last four months. So, for those few of you who have stopped by The Left Anchor to see what Big Blue has to say, I sincerely thank you. I know it's not much, but it's nice to know that each of us -- through this wonderful medium of the interent, the most democratic form of communication in history -- can reach out to one another from great distances and bridge the divides of race, age, or class. Many thanks to those of you who have been generous enough to follow along with me on this experiment.
But I'm not going to devote an entire blog post to something that likely matters only to me, so here's the real thrust of my argument today:
A couple of posts up yesterday over at Tapped (here and here) ponder over the writing portion of the SAT and why our students largely can't seem to put together strong, insightful, well-sourced essays. (Admission: my girlfriend was a grad student who taught freshman English and I can testify to the unbelievably poor writing skills of America's youth). So I thought I'd add my two cents on the failure of our education system to enhance our students' writing skills.
Students don't write well because at both the high-school and college levels, the teachers are too willing to overlook poor writing. If you don't demand greatness, you don't get it. If a student can't put together a good argument in a reasonably structured way, then that essay deserves no better than a D. The fact is, though, that those essays consistently earn B's or at worst C's. That's just not enough of a punishment to encourage the students to perform any better.
Now, if you happen to be a good writer already, this dynamic puts you at a significant advantage, but at the same time, there's nothing worse than a professor giving you an "A" on a paper that you would personally rate a "C." But in my experience, that is what college is: a never ending process to encourage students to under-perform because professors are too lazy to challenge them. Whether this is from pressure to keep the GPA's artificially high in order to improve a college's ranking, I don't know.
What I do know is that every student would benefit far more by reading than writing. Ultimately, reading is the best way to learn how to write. You can be reasonably sure that if a text is important enough for you to read, then the writer is excellent at structuring an essay. The more you read, the better you become at writing.
If colleges pointed their students in directions that encouraged them to read books that were interesting to them (but within the bounds of course objectives) rather than texts assigned with no consideration to the fact that students don't read books that bore them, then we'd probably see a lot more students actually reading the texts instead of glossing them. I'm not saying students should be able to design their own course, but a little added freedom in choosing at least some of the texts to be read during a semester would likely ensure greater investment on the student's part.
I might even argue that "glossing" over texts is the single biggest factor in contributing to poor writing among students. They don't write well, because they don't read well. They scan books, picking up the major points, but not the actual structure of the argument, then when they write their own essays, they aren't aware of how to adequately structure an argument. They work in broad strokes with little narrative flow and a near complete lack of nuance or genuine evidence.
One final point: topic sentences are for losers. They are a lazy writer's way of winning points. If a reader can't understand the point of a paragraph after reading it, then the author is a terrible writer and so-called "topic sentences" would merely serve to obscure that fact. Not to mention those sorts of essays tend to be the driest, most boring essays imaginable.
The problem isn't with topic sentences or five paragraph format, it's with papers lacking a thesis to begin with and then lacking the ability to structure whatever argument they're making and failing to back up those arguments with sufficient or relevant evidence.
This inability to write lies in one place: the instructors at both the high-school and college levels who are too willing to look past poor writing. It's a detriment to both the professors (who will continue to have to read such awful essays) and the students (who deserve better for the money their paying in college).
I'd be greatly interested in the opinions (especially of current students or long time teachers) on just what it is that serves as the greatest impediment to our childrens' writing skills.
Cross posted from The Left Anchor.
Comments (7)
Now here is what has been asserted: "What I do know is that every student would benefit far more by reading than writing. Ultimately, reading is the best way to learn how to write." Perhaps I can improve my foul shooting in basketball by watching others shoot foul shots rather than practicing in the gym myself? And perhaps I can improve my piano playing by skipping playing the piano but listening to Thelonious Monk recordings instead. A necessary part of becoming a better writer is to write more. A better way of becoming a better person is to practice being a better person, not watching saints from a distance.
April 26, 2008 10:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm an English teacher. Kids in this country can't write for both the reasons you state above:
1. Because they don't read. You are right: the only way people become good writers is by reading. I tell my students this all the time. Whenever they ask me how I know so many words, I tell them it's from reading. But they don't believe me. They're convinced I sit with a dictionary in my free time and memorize vocabulary.
2. Because teachers don't hold them to high standards.
But it is difficult to hold them to high standards when they eke out the miniscule paragrapths they do. It's a painful process that I try to encourage my students to become invested in by allowing them as many re-writes as they want if they have the ambition to get an 'A', but most of them pass on the opportunity because the process is too painful. Not a lot of stamina for learning in this generation. They're too used to easy undemanding entertainment.
So what have I done about that to encourage them to work harder to be better writers? Exactly what you suggest -- give them bad grades. What happened to me? Complaints from parents, and problems with administration. Because administration HATES to have complaints from parents. I actually lost a job over this. And frankly, I need tenure as bad as the next person. So I don't worry about it any more. Do I still give bad grades for bad writing? Yes, but now I have all sorts of other assignments that allow students to make up those grades in other ways. It keeps them and their parents happy. Cynical, but like I said, I've been burned.
3. Also, have you read the writing of a lot of teachers and administrators? They can't write either. How are they going to hold kids to high standards when they don't know what high standards of writing are?
Another thing: I also got into trouble at the school I mentioned above because when it came time to grade state ELA assessments, I didn't fudge the results and gave the students the grade the instruction rubric clearly laid out. The other English teachers were up in arms over this,especially when it came to the results of the 'A' students or the ones who were barely passing, and I got in big trouble, was taken off the scoring panel. You have no idea how many state assessment results are fudged by school districts whose teachers don't want to lose their jobs or sully their reputation.This is NCLB at work.
April 26, 2008 10:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
If reading consisted in watching some text go by and asking your friend to pass the chips, you could equate it to spectating at a ball game. That's absurd. Reading is a way of actively taking part in language. The first commenter evidently has not had this experience (and may be the exception, someone who writes ably without long immersion in other people's good writing). It's not just students, by the way, who can't write effectively: Reading newspapers and listening to TV news announcers is torture. Many blogs, too . . . present company excepted.
April 26, 2008 11:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
I absolutely agree that writing is an enormous part of becoming a better writer. But I also believe that reading well thought out arguments is also necessary to becoming a better writer. To this end, I believe that it would be beneficial for students to be able to pick a text or two that interested them in each class -- something they are invested in. My training in writing is limited, but I am consistantly told that I am a strong writer (and I don't mean this to sound arrogant in any way)... but if I am a strong writer, then some of it is from talent, much of it is from reading, and much of it is from writing.
But right now, we seem to be under the impression that writing and writing and writing is the only way to improve, but I can't think of a single poet, author or even academic who wouldn't also argue that reading good writers is equally beneficial.
Unlike say, watching a basketball player (which will not make you a better player), reading is in itself an excercise in understanding the art of writing, which is why I believe that reading materials which interest us (and are not merely assigned to us) is an excellent way to invest students in the art of wordcraft. We can learn very much by studying authors and academics whom we admire.
April 26, 2008 11:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Given your position as an English teacher, I'd be most interested in what more you had to offer on the subject.
April 26, 2008 11:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I teach community college English (albeit with a larger focus on Literature and Creative Writing than on composition). While the points you make are certainly factors, I have to argue with your statement that the instructors are SOLELY responsible for the poor writing skills of many students, as well as with the motivations to which you attribute that failure.
I try not to let mediocre students slide, but when it has happened it has nothing to do with pressure to show a high GPA or improve my school's ranking. It has been because I am exhausted. Minimal state funding requires increasingly larger classes and heavier classloads, and many students get INTO college with atrocious reading skills. Time spent reviewing basics they should already have is time taken AWAY from teaching them the subtleties of how to energize their writing or to edit out the chaff. When I've read ten essays in a row by students that cannot go three sentences without making major subject-verb agreement or possessive errors, darned right I'm happy to reward the student who can manage vaguely mediocre competence with a B instead of the C s/he perhaps deserves. Especially if I'm dealing with over a hundred essays per class per semester.
As for why the students get to college so compromised, I don't blame the high school teachers so much as state demands that they "teach to the test" and the number of colleges that are trying to use computerized competence grading to get in, because of cost and efficiency improvements over hiring human beings to grade the entry essays for writing competence (one program a local college used would automatically pass anyone who wrote over 2,000 words, no matter how bad those words would be, but the administration insisted they keep using it because they'd already paid for it).
Speaking of efficiency, more and more students are trying to get by doing less and less--not just because they're lazy (though that's sometimes the case) as because they have to work one or two jobs in order to afford going to school in the first place. More and more students cheat as well, because of the unfortunate belief they seem to hold that the point of going to college is, in the end, to get a degree with a high GPA, not to actually learn anything. In the last two weeks I've caught two separate students plagiarizing. Students have to WANT to learn. Does this not make THEM ultimately responsible?
The issue definitely does need examination. But to blame only the teachers and professors is, in my opinion, shortsighted.
April 27, 2008 1:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
I can certainly understand the impulse. I just wonder what's to be done about. I think paying our teaches (both in high school and definitely in community colleges) would be a good start.
No problem is intractable. And this has been a problem long enough that somebody, somewhere should have a handle on it.
But I'm not that person. Truth is, it's probably related to the ridiculous way we fund our public schools (property taxes pretty well ensure that poor communities have poor students and then poor college students -- both in economics and ability).
April 27, 2008 2:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
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