It’s easy to lament student writing abilities. Alarmist complaints can be regularly read in The Chronicle, popular journalism, and books. It’s easy for teachers to take their frustration with a few student writers and extrapolate from it a number of conclusions based solely on their own experiences, histories, and biases.
But academics should demand more from such public statements. We should demand not personal feelings and frustrations, but research-based evidence grounded in more than a sample of one. Those of us in the field of rhetoric and composition have spent decades gathering such research about student writing. Let’s consider four research-supported points about student writing that should help put to rest the public narrative of calamity.
First, students are what they have always been: learners. There is no evidence that student writing over all is any better or worse than it has ever been. What is true is that faculty members have been complaining about student writing for as long as students have been writing.
As David Russell outlines in his history of writing in the American university, “Until the last third of the nineteenth century, writing instruction beyond the elementary school was largely unnecessary, for writing was ancillary to speaking” and the curriculum consisted primarily of “Latin, Greek, mathematics, and rhetoric.” In the late 1800s, Harvard sounded an alarm about the “illiteracy of American youth” due to the fact that, when suddenly presented with the need to write extensively on an entrance exam with no prior writing instruction, students struggled to do so.
Providing students with grammar worksheets does not produce expert writers any more than memorizing rigid rules about biking produces Tour de France cyclists.
Harvard was not the last to sound such alarms. For example, in the 1970s, a Newsweek cover screamed: “Why Johnny Can’t Write,” and the accompanying article claimed that the “U.S. educational system is spawning a generation of semiliterates.” Here in The Chronicle, English and history faculty complain: “My students can’t write a clear sentence to save their lives,” and “The staples of paper writing, including the basic punctuation of sentences and the clear organization of ideas, … are almost nowhere to be found.”
These are only a few of the complaints spanning over 130 years; all sound eerily similar, and nearly all allude to a golden era of student writing that, as Russell’s history clearly illustrates, never existed.
Second, to improve as writers, students need to write frequently, for meaningful reasons, to readers who respond as actual readers do — with interest in ideas, puzzlement over lack of clarity or logic, and feedback about how to think more deeply and write more clearly to accomplish the writer’s purposes. There is no shortcut.
Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, research shows that providing students with grammar worksheets and skill-and-drill exercises and extensive line editing does not produce expert writers any more than memorizing rigid rules about biking produces Tour de France cyclists.
All of us learn to write well the same way we learn to do anything well: by doing it. Students need to write and revise in as many classes, internships, and extracurricular sites as possible, but they won’t produce expert or error-free writing overnight.
The third point: All writers struggle with new genres and conventions; learning to write in new situations always requires instruction and practice because there is no singular “writing in general” and certainly no singular “good” writing in general. As I wrote in a chapter for a collection called Bad Ideas about Writing: If you doubt this claim, “go to your desk right now and attempt to write something in general. Do not write for any specific audience, purpose, or context. Do not use any conventions that you’ve learned for school, work, creative writing, and so on. Just write in general.”
You can’t do this because it can’t be done. We are all always writing something in particular. Once we’ve learned scribal skills such as letters and basic grammatical constructions and conventions, everything else is quite particular: the genre, the audience, the purpose, whether there should be main claims and if so where, what counts as evidence, what “succinct” looks like. Scholars from various fields have quite different ideas about these matters.
We use the term “writing” as a shorthand, and to vent our various frustrations, but we don’t all mean the same thing by it. When opinion columnists opine that “our students can’t write,” they mean that students can’t put together a sentence or paragraph that appeals to their sensibilities or adheres to the norms of writing in their disciplines or professions. However, the characteristics of “good” writing differ dramatically for history essays, grocery lists, fan fiction, text messages, poetry, grant proposals, lab reports, ethnographies, and opinion columns.
We can help our students improve by being explicit and specific about what we mean by “good writing.”
Which brings me to a final point: Teaching writing is everyone’s responsibility, but it’s not any one person’s responsibility to teach all kinds of writing. We are each responsible for helping students understand the written practices that we use in our fields and professions.
Those of us who study rhetoric and composition for a living can provide students with a solid foundation in what the scholar Shannon Carter calls rhetorical dexterity. We can share rhetorical principles and heuristics for writing, and provide extensive opportunities to practice and revise with feedback. But the instruction and practice can’t end with us.
Faculty need to recognize themselves as expert writers in their disciplines; they need help seeing what have been called their expert blind spots and gaining language for talking with students about writing in their context. Teaching writing in this way doesn’t require that every historian or engineer become a composition teacher. However, helping students with writing does require that institutions provide faculty members with support in making their writing-related practices explicit for students. As we’ve demonstrated at the Howe Center for Writing Excellence here at Miami University, there are many methods for helping faculty learn to do this.
The research is clear that we can help students improve as writers, but this requires a system in place for long-term faculty development and support. Institutions and their faculty and students can only benefit from investing in such support.
Elizabeth Wardle is a professor of written communication and director of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University of Ohio.
