Why Can’t Most College Graduates Write a Decent Essay?
Writing is a recursive skill.
It involves reading and analysis as much as it does writing and editing. After twelve years of writing instruction in school, students should have mastered the art of writing before coming to college. University-level scholarship should be where they refine their rhetorical skills while exploring courses of study.
Instead, college students are graduating with gaps in their instruction, a lack of writing experience, and desultory writing skills. In fact, most college graduates seem unable to write a decent essay.
Gaps in instruction
College students do not master the art of writing, in part, because they have not been held accountable for quality writing in middle and high school. The instructional focus has instead been on reader-writer workshops that cheat students out of understanding the basic building blocks of language. A focus on whole language has destroyed student writing.
Attention to syntax and spelling has waned over the last decade, but that’s not the only challenge. Students are mostly incapable of mounting a coherent and logical argument. Their rhetorical skills are deficient and their grammar appalling.
Who is taking responsibility for the deficit in writing skill? No one, it turns out.
Lack of writing experience
College students have limited essay writing experience. Teachers do not require their students to write essays, largely because the teachers themselves have difficulty grading them.
Evaluating writing is labor-intensive, and teachers often skip giving an in-depth analysis and feedback of writing in favor of holistic scoring.
Mediocre writing is commonplace
Students are ill-prepared to write, and the result is mediocrity.
Excellent writing skills are rarely taught anymore. High school teachers do not teach rhetoric because they haven’t learned it. College professors do not have time to instruct students in logic and rhetoric because they have a course of study to present. It’s assumed that college students will already have the skills needed for writing, and it goes without saying that students should be able to write a grammatically correct sentence.
Instead, most college students can’t put their thoughts together on paper. They are unable to express themselves clearly and coherently in writing, they lack vocabulary skills, and the businesses who are hiring college grads have noticed the deficiency.
Writing is thinking. Until we teach writing in a systematic way that includes not only grammar, usage, and mechanics, but also logic and rhetoric, we’ll continue to award degrees to college graduates who can’t write a decent essay.
I have been through the same facts realising that there can be two reasons for such poor outcome in attempt of writing. There are various ways that an individual can opt for improvising essay writing skills. Reading more of other authors is a good way to learn and it can also be developed by consultancy of professional essay writing services.
Yes, learning to write requires multiple drafts with meaningful feedback. But how can we expect this to happen when our secondary teachers see 160 students a day? When college writing instructors (often poorly paid untenured adjunct faculty) have dozens of students on multiple campuses to teach? In order to improve essay writing, we need to guarantee that there are low enough student/instructor ratios for that meaningful feedback to take place.
I concur with the position presented, and propose earlier instruction on how to paraphrase and use quotations in basic writing classes. One obvious outcome of the lack of writing skills is the increase in plagiarism. Without developing the critical thinking skills required for writing a cogent essay we produce shoddy, unsupported, and sophomoric product.
When I was teaching a geography course, I had students (N=~70) write 4 essays a semester, i.e., once a month. Two practices greatly increased the ability of these assignments to improve student writing skills. First, I learned about the need for a good RUBRIC for the essays. When I tried to create my rubric, I discovered this was not a 10-minute exercise but a multi-week thought requirement. I ended up with 3 primary criteria (content, organization, and English usage (grammar, spelling, etc.). I read the essays, marked on them, and then assigned so many points for each criteria, and made feedback on what was good or not good for each criteria. This gave them feedback. That helped a lot. But I still had one problem: I gave students an option to re-write for a better grade but they often didn’t take advantage of this.
That led to the second major change. The following semester I put a new policy in the syllabus: “I don’t grade first drafts” How do I tell when an essay is a first draft? If it gets a grade of C or lower. Second part of the new policy: When “first drafts” are submitted, the recorded grade is 0 – until a rewritten version is submitted. Anyone can rewrite for a better grade but the students who really need to revise their essays are now motivated to do so. But the students have the grade and comments for each criteria on their first draft. So they know what needs attention and what doesn’t.
This worked wonders. On the first essay that semester, ~40% of the essays needed to be rewritten; on the 2nd essay,only ~15% or so needed to. On the remaining two essays, nearly all of the essays came in well-written. Students knew what criteria I cared about; they also knew what they had to do, to do a good job for each criteria; and they knew that if they didn’t review it for each criteria before they turned it in, they would have to rewrite it while the class moved on to new material. Students often told me later, that it was in this class that they really learned how to write carefully. I have shown these ideas to other teachers and they like this approach, but they have to think carefully about what the criteria for their rubric need to be.