Colleges should teach the important writing behaviors first, one at a time, in sequence.<\/b>
There are a lot of students who enter college as lousy writers \u2014 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 \u2014 any college \u2014 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 \u2014 and asked kids to read and play instead]
By John G. Maguire
The failure of many of today\u2019s 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 \u201c Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.\u201d 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, \u201cBefore reading this book, I took it for granted that colleges were doing a very good job.\u201d
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 \u201clegions of college graduates who cannot write a clear, grammatical sentence, \u201d says Natalie Wexler of The Writing Revolution, an educational nonprofit group focused on the reformation of writing pedagogy.
Why aren\u2019 t they learning? There are multiple causes. One is that schools admit students who can\u2019 t write and then pack them into comp courses taught by adjuncts. But the main problem, I think, is that the colleges are not really trying to teach students to write clear sentences. Not anymore. First-semester writing courses now cover rhetorical strategies, research, awareness of audience, youth civic activism \u2014 everything except the production of clear sentences.
\u201cThe college writing profession has made a conscious decision not to teach style, \u201d says Phillip Mink, an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Delaware. \u201cIf you review the scholarly literature, which I have done, you will find virtually nothing about student prose at all.\u201d To the full-time professionals who publish in journals, Mink says, \u201cthe quality of student prose is nothing more than an afterthought.\u201d
We could wring our hands and ask how we got to this pass, but it makes more sense to decide what to do going forward.
[What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning]
I propose that we redesign our college writing courses from the ground up, and fast. We have to stop kidding ourselves that students can write sentences when they enter college \u2014 because many cannot \u2014 and start teaching them how to do it. We need to revise writing courses and directly teach style \u2014 the readable style.
Strunk & White\u2019s \u201cElements of Style\u201d might be a good place to start, but it\u2019s not enough. We need a real theory of what constitutes readable writing so we can build a course on that theory. I\u2019 d recommend going back to \u201c The Art of Readable Writing \u201d by Rudolf Flesch and teaching from that. (I have in fact developed Flesch\u2019s ideas into a course.)
Professional writers and editors, such as those at The Post, know readability can be learned. They have learned how to be vivid and interesting, what to do when a sentence is screwed up by a bad verb, and why one controls sentence length. Why not teach these skills to college freshmen?
The composition profession evades the teaching of writing, I think, because the job seems impossible these days, especially in 14 weeks. How can you get them to write well when half the students in your classroom can\u2019 t find the subject and verb in a sentence? Much easier just to talk about rhetorical strategies.
But redesign the courses so they focus only on readability of style and we might get somewhere, even in one semester. First we figure out what makes a readable style, working from Flesch and Strunk & White, and then we reward students for doing it.
Myself, I\u2019 d consult with Kesuke Miyagi, the karate master played by Pat Morita in \u201cThe Karate Kid\u201d (1984) .
Everyone, even today\u2019s students, remembers how Mr. Miyagi insists, \u201cWax on, wax off, \u201d to the kid, who is sure he is being enslaved and abused \u2014 but then later discovers that the waxing and fence-painting motions are foundation skills for karate, and he\u2019s grateful. I\u2019 m a teacher, and I know what Mr. Miyagi did \u2014 he tricked the kid into learning. He got him to do important behaviors first, and didn\u2019 t reveal where they fit into the overall skill until later.
Colleges should teach the important writing behaviors first, one at a time, in sequence. They should offer new writing courses that assume students know nothing about sentences and train new sentence behaviors from the ground up. Be repetitive and tricky \u2014 fool the kids into doing the right thing. Create muscle memory. Think \u201cw ax on, wax off.\u201d\u00a0 The kid\u2019s goal was to win the karate contest. The student writer\u2019s goal should be mastery of the readable style. Period.
[What happens when young kids are forced to sit too long in class]<\/p>\n