Teach Writing Quickly and Well

Tara Gray

TeachingAcademy

New MexicoStateUniversity

505-646-1013

Fax: 505-646-1330

September 2005

An earlier version of this paper, entitled

“Your Students Can Too Write—

And You Can Show Them How,” appeared in

Journal of Criminal Justice Education,

Spring 1998, 9(1).

Abstract: Workers spend three-fourths of their time on the job communicating orally and in writing, but only ten percent of all social science faculty members teach writing-intensive classes. Faculty members argue that grading is too time-consuming, class time is already full, students don't like to write, and they themselves are not writing experts. This article is designed to help teachers overcome each of these problems and to reassure them that "our students can too

write—and we can show them how." As teachers, we are the standard-bearers: We can hold students to whatever standards we choose, as long as we give detailed instructions and grading guidelines.

* I thank Stephen Bernhardt, Chris Burnham, Gregory Colomb, Jody Crowley, Harriet Linkin, Jon'a Meyer, Joseph Moxley, Barbara Millis and Joseph Williams for their comments. I also thank Liz Doty and Grace Doan, who helped write the sample papers included in the attached handout. Finally, I thank the criminal justice majors at New MexicoStateUniversity, whose comments transformed the paper. This article is dedicated to them.

Teach Writing Quickly and Well

The importance of communication skills cannot be underestimated for college students, who are expected to spend 75 to 80 percent of their time on the job communicating, both orally and in writing (Stine and Skarzenski 1979:30). Writing may be the most important skill that students, including criminal justice students, learn in college. One administrator commented that the writing of his college-educated workers "bordered on the pathetic" (as quoted in Kerle 1994:5). The administrator went on to question two academics on a panel, asking why colleges and universities don't teach students to write. Although many faculty members wish that the English department would send only polished writers to our classes, the wish is fanciful: Our students need our help to learn to write persuasively in our disciplines.

Unfortunately, writing skills, and the critical thinking skills required to write well, are difficult to teach and to learn. Fewer than ten percent of social scientists (N = 793) teach writing-intensive courses, and half of these thought their courses were writing-intensive because they required term papers written entirely outside the class (Boice 1990:14). Faculty were then asked why they resisted bringing writing into the classroom and they gave the following responses, in this order:

1. Grading writing assignments requires too much work.

2. My classroom time is already full.

3. My students will dislike the extra work.

4. I am not an expert at teaching writing.

Students in the social sciences were then asked what made them reluctant to enroll in writing-intensive courses, and they expressed the same concerns: too much work, too little time outside class to do the work, and their own lack of aptitude as writers (Boice 1990:14).

In this article, each of these concerns is addressed. For example, grading writing does not have to take over your professional life; it can be accomplished quickly and fairly. Teaching writing and revision deserves some class time, and this article presents one way of teaching these skills in as little as one class day. Even though students may dislike the extra work that careful revision entails, good instructions and clear grading guidelines can make it more fun. Finally, teachers do not have to be writing experts to help students write better.

Teaching Revisionby Providing Detailed Instructions

When a teacher begins to teach revision, the first and most difficult task is providing good instructions, which is all the more difficult because most of us are not experts at writing or revision. As a new teacher, I first assigned a term paper with the kind of instructions my teachers gave me: "Seven to 10 pages, with seven to 10 sources, typed." These instructions yielded what I believed to be some of the worst papers ever written.

Thinking that some of the fault must be mine, I decided to explain more fully my expectations for papers (Fulwiler 1986:28) and provide illustrations of both "good" and "less good" writing (Blowers and Donohue 1994:75). As teachers, we can raise the standard of writing in our classes, but we must clearly show students what qualifies as "good" writing.

Faculty members often neglect to tell students what they expect from a writing assignment, and then are discouraged when the students do not meet their expectations. . . .One of the most frustrating experiences for a student is to second-guess the style of writing the instructor wants (Blowers and Donohue 1994:75).

Indeed, students enjoy writing more when they receive explicit instructions that also serve as guidelines for grading.

When providing instructions for students, teachers set a variety of standards because there is more than one good way to write and because different audiences have different requirements (Blowers and Donohue 1994:75). Although every teacher's requirements are different, the important point is to make those requirements explicit. Further, some ways of writing are better than others. Reminding students about writing conventions works as long as teachers encourage students to follow the conventions only when there is no good reason for breaking them.

Because most professors have not received thorough training as writers, we are not sure how to distill our knowledge into a few pages of instructions. To make matters worse, much of what is published on writing is book length, including books such as the excellent book, The Complete Stylist (Baker 1984). These books require much class time to be taught well; a full semester is ideal.

For professors in subjects other than English, our job is not to teach a semester-long course on writing but to help students improve their ability to argue persuasively about issues in our fields. Instructions should be detailed. In an effort to focus on the most important material for students, teachers may want to focus instead on "big picture" issues that affect the paper at the paragraph level and beyond rather than focusing on “errors” at the sentence level, such as spelling and grammar. Many teachers focus their remarks on sentence level problems, which make it important for other teachers to focus on paragraph level and beyond. Besides, it is demoralizing to students to have every error called to their attention, and research has shown that these criticisms do not improve grammar very much (Moxley 1989). In one writing workshop, Greg Colomb argued that if teachers show students how to improve the paper as a whole, the students will take the time to improve the sentence-level shortcomings. Teachers who try this approach may find that students do know how to write fairly clear, intelligible prose, and, when asked to focus on the "big picture" issues, automatically clean up the sentence-level problems.

Teachers may want to help students write persuasive or argumentative essays because more is at stake when a writer tries to persuade than when the goal is merely to inform. I developed a handout, "RevisingYour Essays," to help students revise persuasive essays. The handout covers several key elements of a good paper, including: thesis, organization, evidence, and responding to one's critics. Before they read these guidelines, I recommend that students write initial drafts for the papers the way they always write their first drafts. Then, I recommend they use my handout to revise their papers to make them more understandable and persuasive.

Introduction and Thesis

For two page papers like these, the traditional introduction is one paragraph long. It starts with general information to give the audience a gentle introduction to the subject and then narrows to the thesis statement (Baker 1984:32). The introduction should provide the context for the problem followed by the problem and the proposed solution (or the promise for a solution). It should make it clear what the problem is and why it is worth solving and answer the question“So what?” Once you have written the introduction, you should be able to find each component. To find out, go through your introduction and try to label the four key components: context for the problem, problem, why it is worth solving (“So what?”), and the solution or proposed solution (Booth, Colomb and Williams 2003).

The introduction should end with a thesis statement. A thesis statement differs from a topic sentence because it does more than just announce the topic: it tells the author’s position and arguments. Many theses contain the word "because" between the position and the arguments (Baker 1984:24). For example, "We cannot afford to abandon rehabilitation because it does work for some people and it has never been tried on a large scale.”

Organization

In order for the audience to understand the paper, closely related ideas need to be placed together. Once they are placed side by side, some can be discarded and others can be sharpened. This process of sorting and sharpening makes prose understandable. To improve organization, students are encouraged to organize each paragraph around one argument in the thesis. Then, they are asked to check their work to see if each paragraph has a “key sentence.” A key sentence is the sentence that contains a short, simple treatment of the topic. This sentence asserts the topic or main idea, but does not try to prove it—that’s what the rest of the paragraph is for. Students should try to find such a sentence for each paragraph and underline it. If they cannot find a key sentence summarizing the main idea, they should rewrite the paragraph (Williams & Colomb, 1995).

Evidence

Next, students should bolster their arguments with evidence. Baker (1984:62) tells about a teacher who invited students to look at a paragraph and score one point for each capital letter on a name of a person or place, each direct quotation, any numbers, and each example or illustration. The results of this exercise were frustrating. “Scores are frequently zero. All generalization. No specific details whatsoever. The reader has nothing under his feet at all.” Instead, each argument should be supported with a variety of different kinds of evidence such as statistics, expert opinion, and examples or case studies. Encourage students to include about two of pieces of evidence per paragraph and to select the most persuasive evidence. For example, a student could support a thesis about discriminationby saying that more blacks are in prison. But it would be more persuasive to be specific and say thatof men in their twenties, the proportion under correctional supervision is 1 of 15 whites, 1 of 10 Hispanics and 1 of 3 blacks (Mauer and Huling 1995).

Responding to the Critics

As students write, remind them to remember that they are not writing for the people who agree with them, but for the people who disagree, but who may be willing to entertain the argument. To argue persuasively, students should present the arguments of their critics in a fair and even-handed manner, and then show why they disagree. Students want to show that they disagree even though they are well aware of the other point of view and have thought about it carefully. For that purpose, students should present any evidence or arguments that their critics might use early in a paragraph, and then explain why their own argument and evidence are better. This style of argument makes writers seem well informed--and fair.

The Conclusion

Just as the introduction takes the reader from the general to the specific (the thesis), the conclusion takes the reader from what the paper has tried to prove (the thesis) to the "broader implications" (Baker 1984:65). Often this is the place for authors to state their positions, and tell what kind of policy changes it calls for. If you believe that the best essays should appeal to both the head and the heart, let students know that the best place to use emotion is the conclusion. "You are the person of reason still, but the person of reason supercharged with conviction, sure of your idea and sure of its importance" (Baker 1984:66).

Checking Their Work With a List of Key Sentences

Finally, you should require your students to check the organization of their papers by underlining the key sentences for each paragraph, placing them in a list, and placing this list on top of their paper as a cover sheet. These sentences don’t have to sound like poetry–they weren’t written to be read this way—but they should be logical and coherent. For example:

1

Thesis: We cannot afford to abandon rehabilitation because it does work for some people and it has never been tried on a large scale.

Key Sentences

Rehabilitation does work for some people.

Rehabilitation has never been tried on a large scale.

Then, I require that this list be submitted instead of a traditional cover sheet. As I will discuss later, this list will save you a lot of time in grading. You can tell much about the quality of the paper at a glance because you can divide the papers tentatively into A, B, and C stacks without reading the entire paper.

1

Teaching Writing in Class–Quickly

I devote one class day to teaching writing. On that day, each student brings to class four copiesof a draft of his or her paper—with a list of key sentences as the cover page. Before class, students are also asked to read the handout, “Revising Your Essays,” and to complete the take-home “quiz” in the handout. The “quiz” provides three sample student papers for students to practice grading. Students are asked to "grade" the sample papers at home by using the same grading checklist I will use to grade their papers.

In class, students work in groups of three (if possible—four, if not), comparing their grades and comments on the sample papers with those of other members of their group. I move around the classroom, grading each paper on a four-point scale and recording the grade in my grade book (they are still discussing the “right” grades). I grade their quizzes on a 4-point scale. Their efforts at grading receive one free point and one point each for the following behaviors: writing comments to the author, marking at least some items on the checklist with a “+”, “√”or “-” and ranking the papers in the right order, i.e. low, medium, high.

Amazingly, some students argue that the paper which best meets the stated requirements should receive the lowest grade, and vice versa. For those individuals, the exercise is an eye-opener because it helps them realize that they don't even recognize good writing. This must surely be the first step toward writing well. After the students have discussed their views of the papers, we discuss how I would grade the papers and why. I discuss my grading system in simple terms, which I call “T-O-E” for “Thesis-Organization-Evidence.” I explain to students that I check every paper for these three things first. In most cases, I consider no other criteria for the paper, unless something else calls attention to itself, such as a student who writes that “Any idiot would agree with me.”

Next, students work in teams of three to help each other improve their papers. To do this, students bring several typed copies of a draft of their papers. I ask students to work in groups of three, but to bring four copies of their papers in case the number of students is not perfectly divisible by three. In groups, peers are asked to try to evaluate these sample papers, again using the class criteria for grading papers. They are asked to write a letter to the author, telling them what they learned, what they would like to know more about, and what was unclear or unpersuasive. These letters are given to the authors, and the papers are due the next class day. I have found this is an excellent way of improving student writing and thinking and illustrating to young writers that "You can't dodge the draft."

Grading Student Papers–Quickly

When 86 faculty members were asked whether students care about instructors' comments on their papers, the majority said “no.” When 160 students were asked the same question, all the students said they scan the comments at least once; two-thirds said they read them once when they are returned and again more carefully at home. The authors concluded that students want and expect more dialogue with their teachers, and that teachers should continue to strive for ways to write good comments, quickly (Kersell and Rhode (1996:5).

When teachers comment on students' papers, it is not necessary to write comments on the paper itself, which frees teachers from addressing sentence-level problems. In addition, some teachers may not want to focus on the topic of the paper. These teachers may prefer to make comments that will help students write their next paper, which will address yet another topic. This is the path I have chosen. I reason that if one paper contains organizational problems, the next paper is likely to contain them as well. For teachers like me, a grading checklist is available in my handout, “Revising Your Papers.” This checklist helps teachers give a lot of feedback quickly. Other teachers may prefer to comment extensively on student papers; these teachers may want to ask students to turn in a tape recorder because talking is 500 times faster than writing (Moxley 1989).