Elizabeth Wardle's essay "You Can Learn to Write in General" challenges traditional approaches to teaching writing in school. She argues that teaching writing as a set of rules or formats does not prepare students to write effectively in real-world situations. Instead, she emphasizes the importance of teaching students to become critical thinkers who are able to navigate the social and cultural contexts in which writing occurs. She also advocates for a more student-centered approach to teaching writing, encouraging students to engage in writing that is meaningful to them and allowing them to choose their own topics and genres. Wardle's essay argues for a more flexible and adaptable approach to teaching writing in academia, shifting our focus
Lucille Parkinson McCarthy, author of the article, “A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing Across the Curriculum”, conducted an experiment that followed one student over a twenty-one month period, through three separate college classes to record his behavioral changes in response to each of the class’s differences in their writing expectations. The purpose was to provide both student and professor a better understanding of the difficulties a student faces while adjusting to the different social and academic settings of each class. McCarthy chose to enter her study without any sort of hypothesis, therefore allowing herself an opportunity to better understand how each writing assignment related to the class specifically and “what
Right-to-work laws have been heavily debated even before their formal inception in the mid-1940s and they continue to be debated today. The core of the debate is about union security, which is the unions right to secure their position in a shop once voted in. One example of union security is compulsory unionism. Right-to-work laws are legislation enacted on a per state bases that limits or eliminates compulsory unionism. The main viewpoint of right-to-work supporters is that compulsory unionism breaches inherent freedoms.
“In fact, at times throughout history, the best authors were believed to have been chosen and directly inspired by God Himself”(Parrott, 71)Students and writers' idea of writing being a given gift is incorporated into their minds; this creates a large pressure and high expectation which leads them to feel unmotivated and inferior when comparing their work with others and not upholding to standards. Parrott exhibits how the lower social and financial status students are negatively affected by that ideology .“Students who were privileged to be of the right socioeconomic, national, or ethnic background already wrote to the university’s standards because they were part of the group in power who set the standards”(Parrott,72). The privileged rich and white students were considered the people who were born good writers since they already wrote at the college level but they only had that level of writing skills because they had more resources and tutors, these unmotivated lower-status students made them think they could never be good writers and ungifted. This mindset made writers dread writing and just wrote to get it over with the author states. “Essays were usually written once and were done, for good or ill”(Parrott,72).
Writing in high school followed much of the same ideas that Lennie Irvin displays in his essay, What is “Academic” Writing. One of Irvin’s points is that writing in college will be different than writing in high school because it will be a form of evaluation to demonstrate your learning. However, many of my high school papers were assigned with the intention to demonstrate the knowledge of an assigned text. Also, Irvin says that one needs, “The Ability to Read Complex Text” and “to think critically as you read” (8). In high school, I was not only taught how to read complex texts critically, but also taught research skills.
Contract grading has widely been embraced in first-year college writing classrooms, which has necessitated new types of responses to writing. Engagement-based assessment criteria such as contract grading do not require a professor's responses as a primary concern for student writers while revising their work. With this in mind, first-year writing students under contract grading ought to focus on feedback from their peer writing fellows which could guarantee their success in the course. The study discussed in the article "Crafting a Writing Response Community Through Contract Grading" by Sarah Klotz and Kristina Reardon entails a follow-up on 24 students across two first-year writing sections held in Fall of 2020. Each section of 12 students
In this article, “University and High School Are Just Very Different” written by Lisa Karen Soiferman, she studies the challenges high school students face going from a specific writing environment to a college writing environment within three months. “First-year university students have to make a rapid adjustment to a learning environment which provides more autonomy, but requires more individual responsibility, than high school (Brinkworth, McCann, Matthews, & Nordstrom, 2009)” (Soiferman 14). Students are blown away from having everything handed to you in high school to be forcibly have to take responsibility for everything you do from then on. This gain of responsibility results into people dropping school, a great amount.
A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing Across the Curriculum, an essay in the journal
Most students in the United States go through their K- 12 schooling years not knowing how to write a proper essay. Most teachers are all about short cuts and getting papers done with the least amount of work as possible. This has led to college students not knowing the basic skills that professors assume they already know. With teachers avoiding teaching necessary writing skills and today’s technology creating shortcuts to use for everything, students are not only having trouble comprehending the English language, but also with writing grammatically correct essays. In the article “For $100k, You Would At Least Think That College Grads Could Write,” contributor George Leef expresses his opinion on the flaws in writing education in the United States.
In Mike Rose's 1985 Article, The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University, he discusses five misconceptions associated with composition in higher-education. He starts by explaining how educators judge students writing abilities from a quantify perspective based on the presence of errors. Then he breaks down the misinterpretation of writing as a tool rather than a discipline. As a result, universities implement courses to remediated students, a program which Rose calls into question. He also examines the proportion of students entering the academy that are consider academically illiterate.
Now as a teacher himself he finds his students struggling to put words on paper and express themselves. He blames the educational system for his students inability to write with their own style and voice. Ballenger stresses the ability to write is more about the topic and the student’s interest in the essay than the grammar and structure of the essays. He finds that other professors view their students essays as badly written with sloppy writing, yet Ballenger focuses on the writing that his students do well. He points out that
In Josh Keller’s publication “Studies Explore Weather the Internet Makes Students Better Writers”, he explores the studies of whether online writing hinders or helps students in their academic writing. Some say that students who write out of school know how to address a specific audience, while others say that writing outside of school implements poor writing behaviors. Several studies, such as one conducted Michigan State University, attempted to end the argument. The researchers at Michigan Sate asked students to keep a record of anything that they wrote. They noticed that only a small percentage of their writing was academic, and that students labeled their out of school writing more significant and continuous than their academic writing.
Throughout English and writing classes in high school, I did not learn much. I understood the basics: always make a few drafts, proof read your own paper, and never use “I”. This year, I took a college English class to switch things up. I have taken a dual credit English class, but I did not benefit from it as much as I did the college English class: Reading, Writing, and Inquiry I (W131). In W131, I learned the nuts and bolts of rhetorical analysis, what to include when writing a paper, and what to expect in a college class.
I came into my first college writing class feeling prepared thanks to you and your investment in me as a student in your AP Lang class. I developed as a writer more than I ever had in your class, and it definitely helped me in my college writing class this semester. I already knew how important it was to revise and continuously critically think about my writing, as well as the importance of multiple drafts and peer review. My English 110 class this semester was very similar to yours because we also did multiple drafts where I could revise my paper as many times as needed. The big difference was that the focus was on different genres and how to appeal to those, which was something new compared to my high school English courses.
Reading and writing was one of my favorite activities to do as a kid, and it still is. Ever since I learned to read, I began to write short stories. Oh, how rude of me! I forgot to introduce myself. Hello Mr.Rase, my name’s Elena Serafimovski and I’m a writer in my junior year of high school.
