All Posts Tagged With: "Students can’t write"
In defense of wrongs
Is there really anything wrong with ‘alot’?
A favourite pastime of English professors is complaining about students’ writing. It’s irresistible, really. The more confident we become with our own prose style and the more we teach others about good writing, the more we forget what it was like to struggle with the difference between its and it’s. We are fully confident that the active voice is often preferable to the passive and that “past experience” is a phrase up with which we cannot put. But we forget that there was a time we did not always know these things. It is sobering to revisit one’s old undergrad papers and see how many of the mistakes we now fume about were the same ones we were making years ago.
Thus, every once in a while, I see a news or opinion piece about how badly students write these days — as though there once was a magical time when to barbarously split an infinitive was unknown — and I have to smile a little. This is a war that will never be won because it is really a war against our younger selves, and it is one that I am increasingly uninterested in fighting.
Not that I don’t still value and teach good writing. Rather, I am less and less interested in chasing students away from what I will call wrongs. By wrongs, I don’t mean obvious errors like writing “loose” when one means “lose.” I mean those usages that are common in English but condemned, sometimes arbitrarily, as being wrong. Such wrongs become the black beasts of writers who see a sentence beginning with “hopefully” and charge off on a quest to vanquish the demon called Misplaced Modifier.
Consider the case of “alot.” My colleague Jacob Serebrin gives the spelling “alot” (one word) as an example of the kinds of mistakes which must be drilled into (or rather out of) students’ minds at a young age. One web site calls the spelling “illiterate” if not “retarded.” Another conjures a whimsical beast called the “Alot” to help you avoid the wrong. But is there really anything so deplorable about “alot”?
The obvious concern is that “alot” is spelled as one word when it should be two. But then why do we allow “always” and “cannot” which, we cannot help but notice, have already been used in this very entry and used to be two words, just like “already”? If we have the wherewithal to turn other phrases into single words, we could do the same with “a lot.”
After all, “a lot” in the sense of “I have a lot of reading to do” does not use “lot” in the sense of a parcel of land (to build a house on a lot), or fate (my lot in life) or any other independent sense of “lot.” The phrase itself “a lot” means “a large amount” and we think of the two syllables as one unit of meaning. And because the phrase is so short, we sometimes imagine it as one word, just as “some times” became “sometimes.” And there is no real danger of confusing “alot” with “allot” (which means “portion out”) because context will make the meaning clear (“We must allot the remaining licenses, but before we do there’s alot of paperwork to be done.) You see, there’s really not alot to be upset about.
Rather than teaching such things as wrongs, I am increasingly teaching them as contested usages. For instance, I personally prefer that phrases with “none” be treated as a singular (as in “None of my students pays attention”) but alot of people disagree and I am not always consistent even in my own writing.
Teaching such usages this way allows students to see that languages really are living entities inasmuch as they grow and change and develop. Today it seems like an error to spell a phrase like a word, but that same word may be accepted tomorrow, nevertheless. Of course, there is a value to following standards, but we should be clear to students and to ourselves that when we say students can’t write, one of the things we really mean is that they have not yet mastered standard usage.
To do that is to descend from our highhorses and really talk about what words are and how they work. We will give students a fuller understanding of English, and students can stop feeling stupid over their many wrongs. Wrongs sometimes do make rights, English professors notwithstanding.
Students can’t write
Profs from St. John’s to Victoria have had it with the wreckage of bad grammar
First year students arrive on campuses with their laptops, an iPod, an iPad, a Twitter account, a personal blog and a Facebook page. “They are so expressive and they have so much to share,” says Margie Clow-Bohan, director of the writing centre at Dalhousie. “But the writing skills need work.”
Most of Clow-Bohan’s colleagues would say she is too kind. The class of 2011 is opinionated and expressive but they can’t structure an essay, don’t know how to write an introduction, write paragraphs that are two pages long, and have murderously bad grammar. This is the lament of professors from Victoria to St. John’s. “The grammar sucks and the writing is awful.” So says Paul Budra, associate dean and English professor at Simon Fraser University, about the quality of the essays he sees: fragments, comma splices, apostrophe, pronoun and agreement errors, and tense mistakes. High school teachers are failing students, he says. “There’s this emphasis on expressing yourself, on this idea that if you get it on the page, it will be fine,” he says. “It’s not.”
“Universities teach subject matter, not writing,” says Richard Stren, a political science professor at the University of Toronto. “It is assumed that by reading academic articles, students will absorb how to write. It doesn’t work. I gave out a lot of Cs.”
“Teachers are afraid to teach grammar,” says Visnja Cuturic, an ESL instructor who teaches grammar and academic writing at the University of Toronto. “They know the rules instinctively, but they can’t teach them. And rote learning is a thing of the past.”
I know this first-hand. I teach a college English class at a downtown college in Toronto. The first time I collected essays from my students, who are a variety of ages but have all received a high school degree, I was stunned. Subjects didn’t agree with verbs. Sentences started on page one and kept up the fight until page two. Commas were either used not at all or appeared in startling places. It wasn’t that there weren’t any ideas in the papers; it was that they were so buried by the wreckage of bad grammar it would have taken the jaws of life to free them.
“I believe writing well is intricately tied up with thinking clearly. As a responsible citizen, you have to grapple with issues at a very deep level, and if you can’t do that on the page, you’ll have trouble,” says Ginny Ryan, director of the writing centre at Memorial University in St. John’s. MUN students come to her writing centre for hour-long sessions; the students get one-on-one attention from a graduate student in their discipline. Since 2008, MUN engineering students are required to write an essay on ethics. Ryan visited the engineering classes and taught essay writing to the students. “It’s difficult to escape MUN without some kind of writing skill,” she says.
Dalhousie requires students to take two “writing-intensive” courses before they graduate. Erin Wunker, an English professor at Dalhousie, teaches a year-long introduction to literature class, which is considered writing intensive. Wunker doesn’t make it an easy ride. “I wear them down,” she says. “I tell them they’ll use these skills if they are writing a persuasive demand for a raise or explaining, in a cogent fashion, the source of a patient’s illness.” Wunker matches students with a peer-editing buddy. “They’re not allowed to write sycophantic, empty comments like: ‘I liked your essay!’ ” she says. “They have to write critical and thoughtful things, or they don’t pass,” she says. The improvement is astonishing. “The students always say they dreaded the peer editing but it turned out to be the most helpful part of the course.”
There are five writing centres at the University of Toronto where undergrads can get help from graduate students. “There was a sense that we weren’t reaching enough students,” says Sandy Welsh, a sociology professor and vice-dean of teaching and learning in the faculty of arts and science at the University of Toronto. Enter the Writing Instruction for TAs (WIT) program. Ivan Kalmar, an anthropology professor at U of T, teaches an introductory course with 1,200 students. The class is broken up into groups of 30 students, and each student attends eight tutorials, run by WIT-trained TAs. Every student submits an essay proposal before turning in an essay, and the TAs, Kalmar says, catch the big errors before the final paper comes in. “It’s an opportunity for students in a massive class to get one-on-one feedback,” he says. “The marks have gone up tremendously, and the students say the tutorials were the most rewarding part of the course.”
“We shouldn’t be waiting until smaller classes in the second or third year to introduce writing skills,” says Kalmar.
Do your prof a favour: write better!
Profs across the country plead for better written essays, and offer tips to help you get there
Writing good papers isn’t just a way to get better grades; it’s doing your part to solve an ongoing humanitarian crisis.
Think of your poor professors and imagine what it’s like to have to consecutively read, mark and make intelligent comments about fifty papers on the same topic. Now imagine how much more painful it must be if most of the papers are poorly written.
Oh, the humanity!
We surveyed past victims of poor paper writing across the country and together, they responded with what amounts to an impassioned plea for mercy: they ask that you, the students, for the sake of your grades, learn to write readable, well-organized papers.
Or, in the words of professor Sorel Friedman of Université de Montréal: “Imagine that your paper is the very last one a professor is going to correct at the end of a very long evening. Try to write something original, or at the very least, clear and logical.”
Academic originality isn’t something we can help you with in the scope of this column, but with our professors’ help, we’ll take a crack at clarity and logicality.
First and foremost, if you’re going to take the time to write hundreds or thousands of words, you should make sure that you’re writing about something. Rambling on from an arbitrary starting point toward no destination in particular is no way to score good grades.
If you have been given a question to address, read it carefully several times and then be absolutely positive that you answer that question and not another. This isn’t politics; you don’t get full marks for answering the question you wish they’d asked instead of the one they asked.
If you’re not given a question, then you’ll have to come up with a thesis, which is a statement of something that you are going to argue to be true. Your subject matter should be relatively focused, so that it’s possible to cover it in depth in the scope of the paper you’re writing, but not so focused that you’ll run out of interesting things to say. If you’re unsure about the appropriateness of your thesis, this is a great time to talk to your prof or TA.
A well-defined thesis will make it much easier for you to organize your paper. You are arguing a point, so your paper should have a logical flow that takes the reader from the thesis statement, through a series of coherent, well-ordered arguments toward your destination, which is the conclusion that the thesis statement is true. This is the nuts and bolts of what an essay is and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and trouble if you keep this in mind throughout the process.
