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Can One Teach College Students How to Write?
Forty-three or so years ago, I had lunch in my residential college at Yale with Donald Kagan, with whom I had three years before taken a couple of courses on ancient history. I had won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and I was considering getting a Ph.D. in history in due course and teaching college for a living. Don was encouraging, but he urged me not to underestimate the downside. Half of what you end up doing, he said, will be no more interesting than driving a truck.
I am not sure whether Don got the proportion right, but his basic point was correct — and I was reminded of his remarks yesterday and again today as I graded the first batch of freshman papers to come my way. I have been doing this, I realized, for four full decades now. I have graded something like 8,000 undergraduate essays, I thought, and what does anyone have to show for it?
What I have in mind is this. There are two reasons to have students write essays. First, it enables them to tackle an intellectual problem of one sort or another, and the exercise does them no end of good. They learn how to think through questions like the one under consideration. They get some criticism and then they tackle another such question. If this was all that was involved, the answer to the question I posed would be that the students gain a lot by repeated exercise of this sort.
The second reason for assigning and grading papers did not have much purchase when I first began to teach, but times have changed. Here I have in mind the problem of student writing. When I first started teaching — at Yale and Cornell — the students I encountered could put pen to paper and come up with something creditable. And, to judge by my experience in the 1990s when I returned to Yale as a visiting professor, most Yale students still can do so.
But this is not true elsewhere. To an ever increasing degree, students now arrive in college with poor writing skills. I do not mean to say that this is true of all of them. Mirabile dictu, the papers that I just graded were not bad at all. But, even at Hillsdale, most years in the Fall term I find myself devoting more attention to correcting grammar and diction than to examining the arguments that the students are articulating.
And, frankly, I am not sure that it is worth the bother — for not very many of them show marked improvement in the course of the term, and when I teach them later in upper-level courses they make the same errors. The reason for this is, I suspect, that good writing is a matter of habit — and it is hard to get out of a rut. If I took the bullwhip that I keep in my office (yes, I really do!) and made generous use of it in class, I might have an effect. But, otherwise, not.
Put simply, to improve one’s writing one has to really want to do so. One has to bear down. One has to edit one’s own prose. One has to recognize bad habits and change them. With regard to grammar, this can easily enough be done — if one really wants to. The grammatical errors one makes fall into a pattern. If you can identify the pattern and become self-conscious about your prose, you can gradually substitute good habits for those that are bad. But, I repeat, one has to really want to do so — and a fair proportion of college students are too lazy to bother (albeit a smaller proportion at Hillsdale than elsewhere).
Diction is another matter. It is next to impossible to get someone who habitually misuses words to use them correctly. The obstacles are simply too great.
Think about it. Every case is unique. When a student misuses a particular word, I can correct the mistake. But that correction is good for that word and that word only. If the student is serious and intent on improvement, he will use the particular word properly in the future.
But what if he misuses all sorts of words? Lots of students do just that. How can one overcome a host of bad habits? Here I despair.
There is a moral to this tale. At 18 years of age, students are a bit like old dogs. It is hard to teach them new tricks — not impossible, mind you, but hard. Their habits have been formed.
If, then, you want someone to learn how to write with precision and vigor, you have to start when they are young. We turn our children over to the school system when they are six, and we recover them and ship them off to college when they are 18. Twelve years is a long time, and in those 12 years our schools often fail abysmally in the relatively simple task of teaching students how to read and write.
It is easy to see how this happens. Our public schools are, in fact, exceedingly expensive day-care centers, and the teachers who pretend to teach there are — how shall I say? — not the brightest bulbs. Ask any respectable college professor the following question, “Which are the undergraduate majors that the dummies choose?” You will get a finite list — communications, business, psychology, sociology, and, yes, education.
I do not mean to say that all of those who major in these fields are dim-witted. That is certainly not true. I do mean to say that, on average, they are far less gifted than those who major in math, biology, chemistry, physics, philosophy, English, classics, and history.
Here is my guess. The average junior-high and high-school English teacher cannot write with any greater precision and vigor than the freshmen I encounter in the classroom. Most, in fact, are far less capable than are Hillsdale freshmen. And what they do not know they cannot teach.
There is one other dimension to this problem that also deserves mention. Where do young people learn proper word use? I would guess, from watching my children grow up, that they learn it from reading books in which the language is deployed with precision and vigor. How do we learn to speak? From hanging out with our parents and listening to them speak. If our parents are articulate, we are apt to be articulate, too. At a certain point, books take over where parents leave off.
But, you might ask, what happens in households where there are no books? What happens in households where the television is always on? What happens if the children have computers and spend their free time playing video games?
You know the answer — and the answer points to a conclusion that we should all draw. If you want literate, articulate children, you have to ditch the television, bar video games, limit access to computers, and get a library card.
Good writing is learned early on. Formal teaching — especially, the study of Latin and the diagramming of sentences — helps a great deal. But nothing is as significant as good reading… and lots of it.
End of sermon.
Published in General
I agree, with one quibble: banning television, video games, and computers is hardly useful if the works replacing them are of inferior quality. In high school, I met plenty of “avid readers” who consumed only modern novels (which, because dialogue emulates speech, are hardly pinnacles of prose).
A computer is a means; much excellent, free reading material exists on the internet.
As a Hillsdale freshman, I’ve found the students’ erudition very impressive.
My writing improved dramatically in college, and I went to engineering school. In my High School English class I was a victim of the open classroom, where we sat at round tables rather than desks and did very little work. I had to make up for it in college.
No, I disagree. Yes, they can. I went into college a poor writer as a result of the NYC public school system, but came out a decent writer. The problem is they don’t teach sentence mapping any more in grade and high schools. Kids are supposed to get grammar and syntax by osmosis, which is a joke. If you can have the college students drilled with sentence mapping, they will be decent writers in a couple of years. Diction is also a problem because students are not taught word connotations. They need to build up sensitivities to the flexibility and precision of certain words. It can be done, but by the time they’re in colleges, teachers have other priorities. I did it by personal initiative. But it certainly can be done.
Now my spelling has always been poor, and remains so. ;)
I think few realize that writing is a key indicator of harnessed intelligence. Those who cannot think straight can never write well
Oh I’ve seen some Liberals that can write very well, but their intelligence is still third grade level. ;)
By the way, I had to cut and paste iWe’s comment. Why is my quoting a comment not working? It’s been like that all week.
Be careful not to confuse intelligence with wisdom.
It takes intelligence to know that tomatoes are a fruit. It takes wisdom to avoid adding tomatoes to the fruit salad.
Try selecting the text with your cursor, then tapping the “comment” button.
?
I blame my first freshman comp professor for my ability to write. I spent a semester writing nothing greater than a paragraph. I was disallowed the use of being verbs and the word “that.” His motto: revision is writing. Had I showed up for the final I would have passed the class and impressed the second freshman comp professor much less.
For what it’s worth, Stephen King, who was an English teacher, believes that you cannot turn a poor writer into a competent one, but you can teach a competent writer to be a good writer.
For the past 19 years I have taught songwriting in seminars. When I began I wondered, “Can one teach songwriting?” I had never before studied the craft myself. I just somehow did it – well enough to earn a respectable portion of my income from the effort. Before I could teach songwriting, I had to study songwriting (16 years after my first song was published.) Taking away the musical element and focusing on lyric-writing, the craft of songwriting is very little different than any other creative writing. Just add rhyme and a lot of similes. Here are a few conclusions I’ve drawn from the experience:
You can’t teach talent.
You can teach craft – mostly by opening the student’s eyes with good examples.
Writing requires re-writing. All professional songwriters know this. Very few amateur songwriters understand this.
Experience is the best teacher any writer will ever have. A writer writes. And writes. And writes. Then she writes some more.
Writing a simple, well-crafted, yet creative song is deceptively difficult.
A hit song and a great song are not necessarily one and the same.
I partly blame Microsoft, overall I think they get to much of a bad rap, but in this area they deserve a lot of the blame. They basically stopped improving their spell check and grammar functions in Word by the mid 90’s.
I remember being tutored as Senior(high school)/Freshman (college), because my grammar was atrocious. The professors and tutors were shocked how bad and almost useless Word’s grammar check was. There are order of magnitude better stand alone grammar checks, than Microsoft’s, yet most people don’t know about them.
However you are right, I doubt grammar checks will be able to check for word misuse any time soon (if ever) because it is such a complex problem. Also even using from the beginning, the most sophisticated grammar checks available, it really only gets you half way there.
My grammar is still bad, especially if I am tired when I am writing. However, a combination of having to write lots of e-mails on complex subjects, and loving to provide excessive commenting on blogs and Ricochet, I have vastly improved my writing in the last 5 years. What helped tremendously is I was writing on subject I knew a lot about that I like talking about of which I wanted to make a point so others actually understood it. School that was very rarely the case even though I never tried to B.S. like so many of my fellow students did. Also I hated writing until my mid twenty’s, mostly because I was so bad at it.
In high school and college, having generic, broad and open ended writing assignments on things I did not care about, at least for me, was a horrible way to improve my writing skills. I needed to be forced to write very detail, technical specific essays, because that is how I think and talk. That is I am of the opinion for many of us, if you force us to write in a way this is to far divorced from how we speak and talk. A student is not going to concentrate on good grammar, and spelling but trying to write in the language you are forcing them to write in.
For some of us, the hardest thing with learning to be a decent writer was trying to separate how we speak and think from how we write. I just don’t see if you don’t speak properly with correct grammar, how you will ever be able to also write correctly.
As I read comments defending fine writing, I keep instinctively noting run-on sentences and poorly crafted arguments.
I am a horrible person.
Liberals who write well often are good thinkers. They just have a different set of presuppositions and assumptions, as well as a void in the head where historical perspective is supposed to reside.
That combination invariably leads to faulty arguments, no matter how beautifully crafted.
I have a hundred essays on my desk that need grading, so I’ll get back to you on this with a full post.
I always had trouble being self critical of my writing. My rough draft would pretty much end up as my final draft, with few changes. I would read it and think “that sounds pretty good” and leave it at that. I never learned to polish and refine.
Grammar-wise, I was pretty good. (pretty well?), but I never could get the hang of “who” and “whom”. I still have trouble with “X and I” vs “Me and X”. I have eternal struggle with words that end in -ible and -able.
Everyone in the comments seem to be focused on grammer and usage. While those are important, I think that a larger problem is the inability to communicate and express ideas cleary in writing. I go through this with my students when they prepare their first paper for scientific publication. It is invariable that a scientist’s first manuscript prepared for publication must be completely rewritten by the other authors (advisor/mentor) to make it ready. It happened to me, and I do it to all of my students.
No, my comment link doesn’t seem to work. Everyone else is quoting. Why wouldn’t it work for me?
That’s in reference to comment #38.
While I don’t suppose you are necessarily privy to these considerations, I would wonder how this shakes out between home schooled, parochial or religious schooled, and public schooled students in your classes. I am assuming that anyone who is accepted at Hillsdale is a bright and able person but would wonder if “how” one is schooled might bring something to light with regard to writing a sentence, a paragraph, a page, and developing an idea in a clear and concise manner.
Unlike what I just wrote.
Seems like I have to copy and paste and then hit blockquote. It used to do it automatically for me until this week.
Thanks JohnW for the thoughts on teaching/learning writing and also for providing us with Miriam-Webster’s contribution on who and whom.
John quotes M-H as telling us: “…the 18th-century grammarians have intervened and given us two sets of critics to watch our whos and whoms—the strict constructionists following Lowth and the loose constructionists following Priestley and the later Webster.”
Priestly – yes, that Priestly, the scientist (among other things) – made quite a decent attempt at a descriptive grammar of English. But descriptivists were buried by the (for lack of a better word) literaturists, who gave us prescriptive grammar. When I said above that the same guy who gave us “whom for objective” also gave us “no prepositions at the end of the sentence,” I was hoping someone would ask, Who is this guy? Well, M-H have identified the mystery person in the quote above. Bishop Robert Lowth.
Bishop Lowth was a brilliant theologian, Biblical translator, and Biblical explicator. He was an expert in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Old English. As kind of a side project he once wrote up a pamphlet with a list of “rules” for English grammar. He, himself, was not quite sure that English really had to follow those rules but his followers, though they have forgotten his name, have taken his rules as gospel. Ever since teachers have felt it was their duty to torture students into redoing their natural English to fit the Bishop’s unnatural rules. Too bad the intelligentsia of the period choose Lowth over Priestly as the arbitor of correctness. Since Lowth’s rules were prescriptive while Priestly’s were descriptive, Lowth probably fit their proclivities better. So Lowth – a wiser man than his followers – became the unknown god of prescriptive grammar.
My sense is that the kids from parochial and private schools and the home-schoolers are better prepared, on average, than the freshmen from public schools.
By the way, I have very much enjoyed these comments, and I agree that one can teach someone who is tolerably good as a writer to be better. I am not so sure about those who start out as terrible writers.
Depends what we mean by writing. I think it might be impossible to teach style but it is quite possible to teach structure.
My Catholic grade school teachers drilled us in skeleton building. Think of 3 points you want to make to answer this question. Write a paragraph about each point. A paragraph has 5 sentences. An introductory sentence, 3 sentences about your point, then a conclusion sentence. You need an introductory paragraph and a concluding paragraph. The first sentence of your introductory paragraph must contain your thesis statement.
As a kid one follows that slavishly. Then one learns how to manipulate that structure. The real skill was to consider a structure prior to putting pen to paper.
Now people “write like they talk.” Stream of consciousness. Like journaling.
According to some measures, literacy is at an all-time high:
http://www.cracked.com/article_20731_5-amazing-pieces-good-news-nobody-reporting_p2.html
Purely Hypothetically-Speaking: Would it be better that more university students could write at a college level if it also meant that fewer people in general could read at all?
Paul, the red ink in your example above seems to have been written by some one who is dyslexic. I recognize this because I am. At 69 Istill make the same mistakes.
I’ve tried to teach my own children that good writing is the product of (1) practice, (2) thoughtful wrestling with facts and principles, (3) constant editing of oneself, and (4) reading the works of writers who write well.
The hardest, in my opinion, is no. 3. It requires self-criticism, and we live in an age that eschews self-critical thinking. Maybe geniuses like Dickens and a few others can produce beautifully written first drafts. The rest of us (and that includes most great writers) must erase, re-write, re-think, clean, and polish what we write.
Writers from Flaubert to Flannery O’Connor to Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent far more time editing their work than creating their stories.
The amount of time I spend on a single comment to make four people on Ricochet laugh is embarrassing.
I did a lot of editing for fellow students when I was at Hillsdale, both “officially” as a paid peer tutor, and unofficially as that friend who just loved red pens. I would agree with this assessment. I remember being shocked at the inability of many freshmen to capitalize proper nouns, provide each sentence with a subject, or match the pronoun to the antecedent . . . not to mention write a decent thesis statement. And these were not dumb kids! They just weren’t taught anything about writing.
For whom? If the comments really are as easily tossed off as they seem, it is we who should be embarrassed!
After all, you are the only cat of my acquaintance who can so much as turn a phrase.
Sadly, there’s no edit button on an undergraduate paper.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.