Crappy Student Writing

A colleague of mine sent around the following, which I thought I would share with a wider audience, since I know many educators read this blog:

1. They Don’t Spend Enough Time.

The typical student waits until the last minute to write an essay. She has worried and procrastinated but spent no time thinking and planning until she sits down to compose. Her writing process becomes her entry into the thinking process. Rather than actually frame and introduce a topic, the introduction is the warm-up, which is why we see so many introductions containing all the points the student wants to make. There is either no thesis or some vague and murky statement that never appears again.

The rest of the essay is the record rather than the product of the student’s thinking. Because she is doing her pre-writing as her writing, paragraphs are often randomly organized and internally haphazard, containing more generalizations without backing because that is all she has at this point, generalizations.

Toward the end of the essay, you may notice greater precision and momentum, leading to what the student felt at the time was a resounding clash of thunder—“finally, an idea”!—often in the very last paragraph. The student is happy to be done with this chore, satisfied with that great idea that came to her in the last paragraph and either too sleepy or to rushed to read the whole thing over again to, at the very least, check for typos.

Sometimes, our best students, who think and write well, turn in these “drafts” and we think, “Well, there are some great ideas here and some highly sophisticated, even elegant writing.” Even though we can’t say for sure what the student is saying, we reward what seems to be intellectual merit.

2. They Are Not Doing the Reading.

Studies of how college students organize their time indicate that most students simply do not complete all of their reading assignments. If they are not reading and relying only on lecture or class discussion, they may not have enough knowledge to write on the topic.

3. The Writing Assignment is too Vague, too Demanding, too Boring, or there is insufficient time or space in the syllabus to complete it.

I know that I have given out bad assignments. Usually, my assignments are bad when I have dreamed up what I think is a creative, ambitious assignment but I really don’t know what I want from them or why I am asking them to do it. With these “new” assignments, it’s a good idea to write them yourself to see what the problems will be for the students.

4. Students don’t think the professor is an audience. They do not feel they are writing to communicate anything to anyone who cares.

For them, school based writing has always been an exercise, a hurdle, a way of proving that you have been paying attention, rather than a communicative act. So they don’t put much time into writing and don’t know how to anticipate what readers need. That “drafty” essay they turn in has no sense of audience because the student was writing to think, not to communicate with a reader.

Preventing Crappy Student Writing:

I don’t have all the solutions to these problems, naturally. If any of you have found ways to encourage better writing, please share with us.

But these strategies do help, in most cases:

1. Give students an example of the kind of writing you are expecting from them. They tend to think that we all have different expectations. We need to all emphasize the same criteria. (This is what I neglected to do for my class this semester!)
2. Talk to them about the importance of writing more than one draft.
3. Encourage them to visit the Writer’s Studio (or equivalent at your institution) with your assignment in hand.
4. Show your writing assignment to the Tutoring Director and some tutors (if your instutition has them) and ask for their feedback.
5. Make the class, and you, the audience for student writing. Ask students to exchange their essays with each other before turning them in. You can ask for peer review, but I find just asking them to exchange and read a few of their peers’ essays on the day they are due gives them a chance to see how their peers write.
6. Try not to elevate grades. If you hate to write a D or F on an essay, leave it off, give comments or complete a grading rubric and ask for a revision. Meet with the student to make sure he knows what needs to be done.
7. For mechanical errors, I mark one example and leave the rest for the student to find. If they can’t find them, then obviously they don’t know what is wrong. If they find them, then you know they know but are just being careless.
8. When making comments, it is really best to identify the problem but not to rewrite anything. Don’t do their work for them.
9. If you feel that correctly diagnosing writing problems is outside your area of expertise, seek help.