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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 think there’s something else here, Professor. And that is the emphasis we put on action. Just do it.
What I mean by that is that planning is considered wasting time. I would imagine that most students just put pen to paper and go, attempting to work it out along the way.
In fact, I think most under 30 live their whole lives that way. In a big active hurry.
Meh…writing is for scribes. The future belongs to the tweet and the 200 word post. I feel like 100 years ago some history professor was having the same complaints. Somehow the world manages to get by so it can’t be that important. You have to believe in the market. It will produce the level of literacy that is optimal.
I have a niece who started at Hillsdale this semester. I wonder if you are teaching her and what category she falls within. She did not have a TV in her home most of her childhood, so hopefully your diagnosis of what impedes good writing holds true!
Ugh.
This Spring I return to the classroom to teach high school freshmen to write a research paper. When I last taught this students turned in all peer editing comments about their paper with their draft. I read it all & if I corrected the same errors their peers caught, the grade on the draft was lowered. The rough draft was turned in with the final draft & if the same errors appeared, the grade was significantly lowered.
That’s a lot of paper & weight to carry for 100+ students.
Sounds like I need to continue the practice.
Don’t much like Latin. I took 3 years of it in HS and cannot remember much of anything about it.
Diagraming sentences, OTOH, was most useful. That we did in grade school. It taught me about adjectives and adverbs. One of my favorite sayings to my kids when they missed the adverb was, “Robert E. ….” It was to remind that that the -ly ending was generally looked for in this instance, there being an adverb required.
Somewhere in all this people either love language or don’t. I am not sure you can teach that.
I went back to school in my late forties, at community college. All of my teachers just loved me, because unlike the 18-year-olds in class, I could follow directions (papers need to be TYPED), and could string together a coherent sentence. I enjoyed writing research papers, and took great care with grammar. And I found the quality of teaching there to be excellent (except for the socialist economics teacher). I agree that kids today need to ditch the electronics and read and write more.
I was blessed with parents who had a house full of books. They read – and read to me – frequently. I also benefited from teachers who could teach. As a result, I write well enough to get by. Too well, in fact – I generally have software documentation duties dumped in my lap just because I complete most of my sentences and the verb tenses usually agree.
Driving a truck would be more fun, but occasionally I turn a phrase that makes me smile. (I’m particularly fond of “a burlesque of accepted software engineering practices.” That was a good day.)
Very few of the younger guys can write intelligibly. Most of them could, but they’ve had no practice.
Hey, wait a minute. I was a middle school English teacher.
I agree, however, with much of what Paul Rahe has to say. The opportunity to throw lots of good literature at secondary students is just about lost. Writing instruction is another sad story altogether. Almost no one has students writing and re-writing lots of short compositions to polish their written language.
Most of the writing rubrics we were encouraged to use (grading standards, for those not fluent in educationese) emphasized basic essay organization. Now that meeting nationwide standards has become the Raison d’etre of public education, no one cares much about refining the skills of those students who are capable enough to have met basic literacy standards.
And as with other art forms, some people are simply gifted writers. That’s not to say that average writers can’t become better with practice and persistence. My oldest son (a sophomore at Hillsdale) has a way with words. Oh, he has some bad habits too, but overall his writing is precise, concise and clear. He did and continues to read a lot. We allowed 30 minutes of television per day when they were small and once they reached school, neither television nor computer use was allowed during the school week. My daughter just started her freshman year at Lehigh University as a chemical engineering major. She, too, is an avid reader having completed several Jane Austen books and The Brothers Karamazov over the summer (“just for fun, Mom.”). I think we have been lucky in the teachers available in our local school district. For the most part, they are rigorous in their preparation. My younger daughter is the least well prepared to write well and I’d attribute this to poor teaching, less talent on my daughter’s part, and lower standards at school. My olders had a much better education and I’ve seen a marked drop off in only a few years even with the imposition of CCSS.
A bullwhip? In the office?
Indiana Jones, meet Michigan Rahe.
Timely OP! I go into this semester’s first writing class in two hours. It’s ideal, only 9 students. All teachers have to do it once a semester. None of them want to do it. Which is why, despite what I believe about teaching writing, I have to do it, too.
What I believe is this. No. You can’t teach writing. First of all, to be a good writer, you have to have a certain amount of native skill, something only a minority have. Second, teaching implies a teacher but teachers aren’t really very important. We can only have a small influence. I tell my students that if they want to be a better writer, I will do what I can to help. But my help will be slight. The only way to get better is to read, read, read, read…. write, write, write, write…. read some more, write some more. And then revise what you’ve written over and over.
If they do that, a teacher won’t be able to take them much further than they can go by themselves. If they aren’t willing to do that, there’s nothing a teacher can do.
One more thing. Teachers of writing themselves, unless they have studied linguistics, almost invariably get side tracked by teaching false rules. The biggie would be: you have to use whom in the objective case. Not true, and it hasn’t been true, for very good linguistic reasons, for well over 500 years.
Another would be – and this would be something that I have to keep my eyes open for – natural changes in usage that are normal and therefore correct for our young students even though it may sound wrong to us. Many or most Americans under, say, 35, tell us that “the movie was based off of the book.” For us old guys it HAS to be “based on.” This is, however, a usage change that has taken hold. When us old guys are all dead, there will be no one left to insist they say/write ‘be based on’. However those be-based-off-of users will already be getting ulcers over what THEIR young students are habitually using.
(Btw, yes I know! A coupla grammar mistakes have made it into the above paragraph. If I could rewrite on my mini Ipad I would. But I can’t. Much as I hate to do it, I am sending this off un-rewritten.
Anyway, could luck with your kids, Paul! And I’ll do the best I can with mine.
I was fortunate to grow up in a household where improper grammar was not tolerated, and to have had teachers in high school and college who insisted that papers be well written. One of my college history teachers was especially helpful in this regard. He would assign a grade for a paper based on the cogency of the argument being made, and write that grade at the top of the first page. Small marks were placed at the beginning of lines if there were spelling or grammatical mistakes that needed to be fixed (e.g., an “x” signified that a word somewhere in the line was misspelled; the word itself would not be circled–I had to find that myself). He would not enter the grade into his gradebook until the paper was turned back in with all corrections made, and if they were not fixed to his satisfaction, the paper would be returned to me to try again. Only when everything had been adequately corrected would the originally written grade be recorded. The extra time required to do the regrades for all the students in the class must have been considerable, but he obviously was concerned that we learn to express ourselves in a clear, consistent (and error-free!) manner. This was also almost 40 years ago, and I think teachers of his sort were rare then; I fear they might be almost extinct now.
Definitely!
I have never heard this. :)
Webster’s defines “whom” as the objective case of “who.”
Marci, Webster’s is absolutely right. ‘Whom’ is the objective case. But, as the editors of Webster’s know full well (being linguists themselves) it’s neither normal nor necessary. ‘Who’ is normal for the objective in modern English. No worries, by the way, if you have never heard this. English teachers, wonderful though they are for some things, do not have much ‘scientific’ knowledge of language. You can learn much from them. But learning the ‘science’ of language from them is like learning the science of science from theologians. English/grammar teachers and theologians are both great as long as they are within their field. But I wouldn’t hire a theologian to design an earthquake proof bridge. Neither should you go to an English teacher for the final word on how Language works. They simply, unless they have studied linguistics, don’t know. And, unlike the discoveries of the physical sciences, the discoveries of linguists haven’t yet entered the mainstream.
Professor, you certainly are correct about the need to practice writing. I remember an interesting experiment years ago. There were two groups of sophomore high school students: those who had a natural talent and flair for writing and those who were just average. The talented ones were asked to write something of their choice every week while the other group had to write on a particular subject every day. By the end of six months, every member of the ‘average’ group had much better writing skills than those of the talented group.
This experiment, of course, was led by a very fine teacher – and I wonder if it would even be possible to replicate it these days. Not that there aren’t fine English teachers, but the time it took to work with the average students may not even be available these days what with the extraneous requirements placed on today’s students. There’s so little time for the (important) basics…
EDIT: English/Grammar teachers should probably just be English teachers. I was trying to distinguish literature teachers from linguists, but linguists are the ones who have a deep knowledge of grammar.
I would venture to suggest that the language spoken on television is far better than the language spoken by students in an average school.
The answer is simple — keep your children out of school, let them watch television and practice writing in the form of texts and facebook updates etc. (how much voluntary writing did you do as a child? I think all my writing was required by school or parents: the dreaded “thank you” letter to Grandma etc.) and make them spend time on the computer where they will quickly learn what good and bad writing is, even if it’s only by deciphering how to cheat at video-games.
Barbara, nice counter example to my claim in #11 that good writing can’t really be taught. However, I think you have a sense that I am kind of right, anyway, don’t you? It sounds like this experiment required unusual circumstances (small classes, excellent teachers, and lots of time invested). In other words, it would require a great deal of expense and an army of excellent and dedicated teachers. I.e., not very practical. Also I would like to see their definition of “improved writing skills.” Such things as learning how to recognize the objective case so that you can use whom correctly, while not a bad thing, would not indicate greatly improved writing skills, at least to me.
Our English teacher in high school would mark the paragraph and section numbers used in the HarBrace Handbook at the beginning of a line with an error in or writings. We were required to look up the offense, to correct it and resubmit the paper.
Several teachers in college would deduct from the grade on an essay if there were spelling (pre-computer days) or grammar errors. There was no resubmittal option. You screw up—you pay. I heard a lot of complaining about that. It didn’t bother me much because of the paragraph above.
Keep up the good work Michigan Rahe! By the way, do you also have a pistol and a chair to use in the classroom?
Tell me you’re joking.
Ha! “proposition” instead of “preposition.” I didn’t even get my own accidental pun. What a Rube. Wait til mom sees this.
Mike, if it helps, the same guy who declared that you have to use “whom” for the object (and, by the way, he used Shakespeare as an example of the sin of using who) is the guy who said you can’t use prepositions at the end of a word. He, himself, wasn’t absolutely sure about his so-called rules but his followers carved them in stone. Not to put you between you and your mom, but you could try a little Churchillian on her. During the war an aide sent him a memo deploring the shabby use of the English language at such a critical juncture in history, for example ending sentences with prepositions. Churchill shot back a memo saying, “I completely concur! This is precisely the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put!”
(EDIT: not to put ANYTHING between you and your mom)
(Second EDIT: You can’t use prepositions at the end of a SENTENCE (not WORD!)
They’res like nuthin hear I dint already now.
I think few realize that writing is a key indicator of harnessed intelligence. Those who cannot think straight can never write well.
I will never forget my 1963 marketing class at Michigan Tech. We wrote three case studies per week and they had to be typed. Thank heavens for erasable bond paper in the pre-computer era. The grade on each paper would be lowered one whole letter grade for each spelling, grammar and punctuation error. Three of us would proof read each others papers and mistakes still seeped trough. It was this class which taught me that I personally can only effectively proof read when I read the text backwards. It forces me to actually look at every word for context and spelling. When I read forward my mind fills in what I expect to see so I don’t catch errors at 100%. I still break out in a cold sweat when I think of that class but the skills I learned served me well the rest of my life.
I am an engineer working for a medical device company. Driving a truck would be a thrill compared to the paperwork I do for regulatory compliance.
As far as what kids learn in school. I recall when my son was a freshman in high school. He came home with an English assignment. The first paragraph of the assignment sheet said, “The purpose of this assignment is to combat racism in our community”. They were then instructed to make a poster against racism and then go out in the community and protest.
I contacted the teacher and explained that I did not expect my son to be instructed to combat anything in English class or to be instructed to get involved in a political movement. I explained that I wanted her to teach him to speak and write, so that as an adult he could effectively deal with the problems that he would have to deal with in the future.
She simply labeled me as a racist and ignored me.