Colleges should teach the important writing behaviors first, one at a time, in sequence.
There are a lot of students who enter college as lousy writers — and who graduate without seeming to make much, if any, improvement. It is true in the arts as well as the sciences, anecdotally evidenced by some of the blog post submissions I get from a wide range of people whose jobs would suggest they can communicate well in writing but, as it turns out, not so much.
How can someone get out of college — any college — without being a decent writer? And what can we do about it? Those are the subjects of this post, by John G. Maguire, who has taught writing for decades at a half dozen New England colleges, including Boston University. He developed his first-year Readable Writing course while at the Berklee College of Music, and he blogs on the subject of writing pedagogy at readablewriting.com .
[What happened when one school banned homework — and asked kids to read and play instead]
By John G. Maguire
The failure of many of today’s college students to write decently, even after years of instruction, became headline news not long ago when a well-researched study of college student learning was published as a book under the title “ Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” Its authors, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, found that 45 percent of 2,300 students at 24 colleges showed no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years. Experts in education were shocked. Bill Gates said, “Before reading this book, I took it for granted that colleges were doing a very good job.”
Those who were paying closer attention than Gates have known for some while that many colleges are terrible at teaching writing. Millions of young men and women sit in freshman composition classrooms each fall semester, but if the Arum report is right, nearly half will write just as badly in their junior years as when they started college. There are “legions of college graduates who cannot write a clear, grammatical sentence, ” says Natalie Wexler of The Writing Revolution, an educational nonprofit group focused on the reformation of writing pedagogy.
Why aren’ t they learning? There are multiple causes.
