Student writing: Is it bad? Is it good? Does it matter?

Paula: I want to discuss the quality of student writing. Since both of us have taught for a long time, it seems to me something we can address. I have to say that I’m confused when I hear people as diverse as merchants in the stores I frequent and women at the gym I go to gripe about how badly kids write nowadays. I happen to think that they write better, in certain respects at least, than they ever have before. Yes, they don’t always understand comma usage, but they do seem capable of writing, when they want to, with fluency and verve. You’ve taught your share of writing courses, Robert — what do you think?

 
Robert: The gripes you mention are definitely a pet peeve of mine. I think society is ignorant about the nature of writing and what it means to write well. There is a widespread belief that good writing is all about knowing where to place a comma, knowing the various parts of a sentence. This misconception comes on top of a recurrent and strange tendency each generation has of insisting that the writing of the successive generation has deteriorated.

I remember talking with my optometrist a while back (he’s just one of many examples), and he asked me what I did for a living. I said I teach freshman writing in college, at Drexel ^[1]. “Oh, that must be a really difficult job.” I may have laughed nervously or something, but I wanted to say, “Not for the reasons you think, buddy.” The reason my job is hard is because grading papers (I teach four courses a term) is exhausting. It’s not hard because student writing “is bad.”

Part of the problem is the belief that writing concerns commas, semicolons, subordinate clauses and spelling. But those aspects are arguably only the most obvious parts of writing, not the most important ones. There are other parts that are at least as important: original thinking, clear thinking, conviction, persuasiveness, clarity. There has been discussion at Drexel about the supposedly poor quality of student writing. The people kvetching are not the writing teachers but rather faculty members in other classes. The complaining faculty members get a paper from a student that they think is not good. The problem (and this is the ignorance) is that they tend to think that the student who submitted the weak paper “doesn’t know how to write.”

But that begs the question: what is good writing and what leads to good writing? My answer is that any writing requires that students invest themselves in the assignment. If a student doesn’t really care about the assignment, can’t see a way into it, the writing will suffer. It’s nearly impossible to write well if you have no conviction about what you’re writing. Second, students have to put in the time. Most of the freshman writing teachers require students to submit drafts and to revise them based on comments from the teacher and from other students. If a student writes a paper (even sometimes a short one) overnight, there’s just a very high chance the paper will not be any good. The problem isn’t that they can’t write; it’s that they haven’t taken the time to write or they haven’t found a way into the assignment.

 

Paula: I think you’ve hit on something important. It may be that there once was a time when students wrote well (i.e. correctly) even when they didn’t care about what they were writing. This may be what the critics out there are really bemoaning. They want the old-time student who would write a technically correct paper regardless of how inane the assigment. Students today won’t do that. They have to care — and when they do, they write something a lot better than those technically correct papers of yesteryear. This leads me to conclude that we may be talking less about writing than about a larger issue: a paradigm shift in which young people need to be more invested in what they do well. They are less willing to simply go through the motions.