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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
Sentence diagramming? The way English teachers teach it? Phlphphhht… The problem generally is, if you think too hard about what they’re telling you to do, you find counterexamples where their instructions produce nonsense.
Now the trees we learned to do in Linguistics 101, ones that respect how language is actually spoken, not how it’s supposed to be spoken, those made more sense.
For one thing, as this example shows, they have some flexibility to acknowledge the ambiguity that naturally occurs in language. (In my experience, many English teachers would declare the parsing where the cow has the axe to be an impossible one, even though it’s clearly possible, if fanciful.)
If you want fluency in a language, even your native tongue, there’s something to be said for first learning how it really functions. Then wisely apply artifice to improve on it from there. Artificial rules from the get-go are naturally frustrating to logically-minded people.
Brian, would you be kind enough to offer a recommendation? Where would I find these grammar- checks that are orders of magnitude better than Microsoft’s? I have a native French-speaker friend whose job requires her to write many e-mails and documents in English. She uses Microsoft Word’s grammar-check. When I proofread her work, I find many basic grammatical errors. (Word seems to be quite good for spelling, though; I find few of these.) It never occurred to me that there might be a better program. Even a twenty-percent improvement on Word would be useful to her. A program that flags words that are commonly misused in English would also surely be helpful: I’m envisioning a dialogue box that says, “Are you sure ‘comprised’ means what you think it does?” (It’s churlish, I know, but I’m getting a bit tired of being that program.)
NB: “grammar-checks,” not “grammar -checks.” Among other things, that’s the kind of error I want the program to flag. In my case it was a typo, but ESL students tend to be stumped by compound nouns and their hyphenation.
I give my Freshmen 10 2-page essays over the course of 16 weeks. I’d give more, but then I’d have to grade them (I have 100 students across 3 classes).
Essays 1-3 are reliably a mess. Essays 4-6 are reliably still a mess. Essays 7-9 are usually acceptable. Essay 10 is usually pretty good.
I do not spend much time critiquing their arguments (I do that at higher levels) but I will point out blatant errors like non sequitors. Mostly I critique their style. And the linguistics folks can bite me. “Academics and Educated people speak this way. I do not care how you speak normally -in this class, you will speak this way as well.” My style was molded by several professors, and I am trying to pass that along -even if the only justification I have is “because I want it done that way.”
I will note, however, that the most common error is the student who writes that “the government is ran as a democracy” or variants.
Casey
tabula rasa: The rest of us (and that includes most great writers) must erase, re-write, re-think, clean, and polish what we write.
The amount of time I spend on a single comment to make four people on Ricochet laugh is embarrassing.
Perhaps so. But being one of those who laugh – thanks for the time spent.
Really? Being dyslexic I had not noticed. That is kind of a surprise since it is usually numbers which are my difficulty, but maybe you meant 96?
Telling students, “These rules are about style. You should use this style whether it makes sense to you or not, simply because it’s the style educated people like to hear,” is one thing – a good thing. Telling them a matter of style is a natural grammatical rule is another thing – a bad, illogical thing that drives sensible language speakers nuts.
When I tutored high school students whose first language wasn’t English, I found they learned “proper English ‘grammar'” much faster if I distinguished between rules that really were natural grammatical rules and “grammatical rules” that were simply stylistic conventions, whose violation still resulted in perfectly grammatical (in the descriptive sense) language, but which would mark you out as a non-elite speaker and writer.
An English class that I took in college had a section on the historical development of the language, and one of the points made was the enormous impact that printing has on the rate of linguistic change. Manuscripts written in Middle English document the comparatively rapid alterations in usage and simplification of grammar that were occurring in the century prior to the introduction of printing in England by William Caxton in 1476. The resulting standardization of syntax and inflections greatly slowed the process of future change. The author of the text we were using (name now forgotten) argued that, based on the frequency of its occurrence in manuscripts, the distinction between who and whom might have disappeared within 50 years of Caxton’s time, if printing had not “frozen” it into place.
When I wrote this — which I did to amuse myself — I thought that next to no one would be interested in piece on the mundane task of teaching writing. Boy was I wrong!
Professor,
What will you take from this conversation to your classroom?
Hope.
And change?
Been out of pocket for a bit and haven’t been able to respond until now. You are so right about the reading. That is the key to better writing. Reading the good stuff, that is.
I don’t know the details of the writing experiment, but you are right. It must have taken much time and effort on the part of the teacher(s). I do hope it wasn’t spent on “who” and “whom” rules.
I read recently about teaching essay writing and how it’s now been reduced to a simple [and pathetically boring] formula. I don’t know what the answer is…
Paul R: Boy was I wrong! [about thinking this would be a topic with few interested]
Matty V: Professor, I have a feeling that just about anywhere else, you would have been absolutely right. Rico, though, is not exactly your typical site. Anyway, thanks for the topic. I’ve enjoyed reading all the comments, every single one. The topic relates to what I do, and apparently relates to what many of the Ricochetti do.
Alighan, thanks for that little tidbit on the preservation of whom. I’ve never run into that calculation on whom’s disappearance, if there had been no printing press, but it certainly makes sense. And yes, widespread literacy must slow the rate of grammatical changes and preserve some word meanings. But what it really does is bring spelling changes almost to a dead stop. Thus the horrendous English spelling system. We still write according to how words were pronounced before Caxton’s world shaking invention. We have to write gh even when it signifies nothing, and the way we have to signify vowel sounds seems to be a system invented by Martians – thanks to the fact that the Great Vowel Shift came after the printing press had somewhat solidified spelling.
Barbara L, could that formula relate to topic sentence in a topic paragraph, followed by three paragraphs for point one, point two, and point three, followed by a conclusion that, in the hands of students following the formula, is basically just a repeat of the topic sentence? I almost can’t bear to read such essays anymore. Thus I assign lots of good short essays for reading so the students can see that skilled writers do not worry about the formula. Granted, the formula may help some REALLY bad writers improve to kind of bad writers. But I can’t see it turning anyone into a good writer.
Paul, as others on this thread have noted, the ease with which one learns to write is correlated with the amount one reads. I’d wager that someone who has read enough doesn’t need to be taught to write. He or she will know intuitively what looks wrong on the page. We can certainly debate whether it’s worth the effort to teach people to write well; it’s true that this is a skill many will not use. But that’s the wrong debate. There should be no debate about whether it’s worth the effort to teach them to read well. If they can’t, they’re cut off from almost every higher human endeavor.
That may be right. I do believe that the study of an inflected foreign language helps as well. One becomes fully conscious of linguistic structures in the process.
Small change.
It need not be heavily inflected. I got just about as much out of studying Spanish and Italian, which are about as lightly-inflected as English, as I did out of studying German and Welsh, both of which are considerably more inflected.
Both German and Latin, with their overlapping of gender and case (and don’t forget the irregularities!), aren’t nearly as ultra-logical as many conservatives believe simply because they’re heavily inflected. For example, what logic is there to having the same ending (-er in German*) for nominative masculine and dative feminine? Even many Germans hate their case system. Maybe there’s a reason languages** tend to become less inflected over time.
I think what matters most is learning a foreign language, whatever it is.
________________________________
* strong inflection
**or at least Indo-European languages
Do Cliff Notes count?
Tearfully, yes.
You are welcome to try to make sense of the stream-of-consciousness that many essays become. Once they’ve learned the formula, they can write differently. Until then, yes, I want them to follow the 5-paragraph format.
Sabrdance, I’m a bit harsher on the formula here in the club than I am with my students. True, I don’t want the kids to believe that by simply following the formula they will achieve a good essay. Or that that is the way good writers write. But I do pull out the essence of what the formula intends and teach that: be clear, and defend what you are being clear about with points that make sense. And then I add things like: grab the reader at the beginning, make it interesting, include personal examples when possible or appropriate, come up with a strong ending…
Then I tell them they have to rewrite multiple times. Rewriting starts with rereading and rereading requires reading what they have written as if they were not the author but an unrelated outsider. This step, sadly, is impossible for most people. It’s just not something your average person is very good at.
Then I tell them something I once heard a world famous pianist say many many years ago. Watching himself play on TV, he was shocked by how bad his technique was. What he took away from that discovery was not that technique is unimportant but that, once you have it, you should let it recede and follow your instincts. The way he put it: first learn technique and then forget it.
Those are the things I tell my students. Does it work? Not really. It might make them slightly better. But if they read and write a lot, they automatically get better without a teacher, and if they don’t, they won’t get much better even with the world’s best teacher. And anyway, it’s impossible to become a good writer without some talent for it, something most people don’t have.
I am not a real writing teacher. I only do this class once a year because we all have to do it, and we all have to do it because no one actually wants to do it. Still, the REAL writing teachers believe it is possible to teach writing, so I might be wrong. But I doubt it.
Nicolas Boileau: Polish repolish, every color lay; sometimes add but oftener take away.
I remember needing to write a humorous illustrative historical story for a chapter in a book. I had done the research on the subject and so put pencil to paper to sketch it out. I included all the details in the first draft of the story (three handwritten pages), and then the real work began. Hours later, I had told the entire story in one short paragraph consisting of two sentences (typed).
Writing are hard.
I don’t know what you’re talking about as to how English teachers teach it. But taking examples of classic writing, sentences especially crafted for prime effect, by classic prose authors who are masters of prose style and breaking them down to a diagram to show students how they work provides models for students to emulate. In time they will they will absorb sentence structure and the flexibility to be creative in their own way.
Barbara, love the quote in 85!
And I think Faded has nailed the reason why lots of reading and writing help a lot but lots of teaching only helps a little. Language is so complicated, spoken or written, it cannot really be taught, only (and here’s Faded’s key word) absorbed. And it can only be absorbed by loving it and swimming in it a great deal. That’s what kids do naturally when they learn their first language (without need of teachers!). But it’s something a majority are, to be honest, not interested in as adults, and probably not very good at it even if they are forced to do it for four years in college.
Intelligence is a funny thing. There are so many different kinds. We all have some kinds. None of us have all kinds. And “writing intelligence” simply has to be there for either absorption or teaching to work, and it’s something only a minority have.
Which brings up one more point mentioned by someone. Half the high school students of the nation, nowadays, go to college. Chances are, we’re just getting a lot more people nowadays who aren’t good at writing and never will be no matter what we tell them about reading and writing a lot, and no matter how we teach them. I recall that Paul mentioned in the OP that Yale students still know how to write. Whatever else they might be, they are probably people with writing intelligence. But get away from the elite universities and only some will have that.
Appreciating and analyzing well-crafted sentences is different from doing a big, steaming pile of those darn sentence diagrams on random sentences, though.