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I teach college Earth science at a good school. It's the time of year when drafts big, high grade impact projects are due, and I'm spending hours and hours marking up horrifically bad prose, and tearing my hair out.

I'm trying to understand how my students--bright, high SAT scores, hard workers--learn to write the way they do.

In particular, I'm hoping some of you can answer these questions:

Why do they insist on using passive constructions to complexify the simplest phrases?

Why do they insist on using complicated tangles of words when perfectly appropriate single words would do?

Why do they insist on writing in 3rd person?

Why are they so devoted to the MLA citation format?

Do they do these things because this is the only way they've been taught to write? Or do they choose these approaches from a range of othe options, perhaps out of insecurity? I really need to understand this. I don't want to undermine their confidence as budding writers, but it's driving me nuts!

Thanks,

Duane

I should've explained--the subject line was a question I got from a colleague whose advisees had complained that I was hurting his students' feelings with overly harsh/insufficiently supportive editing comments. Fair enough, though that wasn't my intention--I just want them to write well.

Thanks,

D

They do those things because that's what they have to do in order to pass a state-mandated writing assessment and/or the ACT or the SAT essay portion.

My school offers dual enrollment courses to seniors in which they earn credits for senior English and college English 101 and 102. They have to pay for these courses, which are taught by visiting college instructors. A couple of weeks ago, one of my yearbook students who is taking the course said to me, "Our English teacher told us that everything we've learned about writing is wrong." No, I explained, he's wrong. We teach students to write a 5-paragraph essay because the people who score the writing assessments will not give a high score to a 4-paragraph or a 6-paragraph essay. We teach that they have to have three points or three examples or three reasons because the assessors will look for those three examples and give them high marks for organization. Anything less will not be well organized.

Standardized testing is ruining education. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle would not be considered master teachers today because they didn't give multiple-choice tests to their students. Imagine answering a question with a question rather than teaching to the test! Bah!

How interesting that linda-allen’s state assessments count off for 6 paragraphs. At a recent scoring conference for Missouri’s End of Course exams, state officials indicated that many students who constrained their writing to fit the standard 5 paragraph limited the quality of their writing.

As for Duane’s problem, it sounds as if your kids might be using good conventions for the English classroom, but haven’t been taught what is appropriate for different styles of writing. As teachers, we know that there is a difference between formal and informal writing. There is a difference between creative and more expository or persuasive types of writing. There is certainly a difference between literary and scientific writing. But (and correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not a science teachers) conventions such as imagery, sound devices, humor, voice, pov are probably not appropriate for most types of scientific writing projects. Have you taught them how you want them to write in your classroom? Have you modeled it for them and shown them anchor papers? This might help:D

In the real world, writing needs to be concise. No employer wants a 10 page essay when a one page summary will do. If there is any requirement on length, it always begins with "no more than" rather than "at least".

In school, we insist that a student reach a certain number of words or pages, regardless of how it effects the quality of the prose.

Thus we punish in school the very quality that is demanded in the real world. Yet another example of how modern education is disconnected from reality.

Most students do not know grammar, even bright ones. In the past grammar was taught by studying Latin or Greek. Now, with the decline in Latin and Greek, many students do not know the rudiments of grammar. This has been my experience. I teach both Latin and Greek and my students always comment how they are learning about English in the process of studying Latin and Greek.

Thanks for your insights.

There's something else going on as well. The following is a final draft (after 2 peer edits and one from me) from a student who sends me perfectly lucid emails, but flips into bizzaro mode whenever she has to write a paper.

" Few households boil their water because they simply cannot provide such benefits because of monetary reasons. "

This is just a random sample, but the whole paper is like this. I'm still not sure what her point is.

She's worked hard on this project, but in the end, it's a disaster--a D paper.

In reply to #1:

Why are so many students bad writers?

Ask George Orwell.  Read his "Politics and the English Language."   He said this in 1946:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

What you can do in your class is not tear your hair out about it.  You should not be spending hours and hour marking up bad prose.  Good teachers of writing don't edit papers.  They don't spend as much or more time correcting or commenting on papers than it took to compose them.  That's counterproductive for both the teacher and the writer.  It's negative reinforcement and doesn't usually translate into improvement on the next paper.

Maybe it's the students' fault. And maybe it's their previous English teachers' fault.  And maybe it's your fault.

Not to be negative or nihilistic, but Orwell's right: There's nothing you can do about it.

I taught high school and college and a lot of this I attribute to the malady of "trying to sound smart."  Tell students it's an essay and the awkward language tumbles out.  This was true in my literature classroom, so I don't think it's particular to non-English courses.

Something that worked for me was to have students paraphrase their papers to me or their peers.  80% of the time they are more articulate, clear, and concise.  I, or their peers, wrote down their responses.  This worked especially well for thesis statements.

As far as MLA...it's probably because they learned citation styles in their humanities classes.  I usually did a quick lesson explaining why certain citation styles are more appropriate for certain fields, and that generally did the trick.

More generally, I do think that the essay tends to be taught as a rigid form, which is unfortunate.  Its beauty is its flexibility.  I generally taught students a sort of template to work through as a starting place, but I never enforced that template as a rule.  But even in college, my students would wonder how to force their long research papers into 5 paragraphs!  Examples helped a little with this.  Once students started to see the variety of essays out there they loosened up a little.

Nonetheless, writing makes them anxious.  I've had very few fluent writers, even among English majors.

I teach AP and college prep English classes, and I can speak only for my school, but the problem with passive voice is that when my students reach me (as juniors or seniors) they seem never to have heard of passive voice.  Because true grammar teaching has been cut from so many elementary and middle school programs, when I try to correct passive voice or unnecessary verb tense shifts, my students often can't identify the verb; so it's difficult to correct the problem when they can't see the problem.

You will have to encourage your students yourself to write in first person.  My students' previous teachers have told them "never" to use first person; so I spend time in my class teaching my students when first person is most effective, etc.  You just need to specify that yourself.  Most students will write to your specifications, but they must know what you want.

Finally, in regards to MLA format, that is standard for most high school English writing.  Again, if you want them to use footnotes, APA style, etc., simply tell them that.  The problem in my school is that my students write only for their English classes, and I'm not exaggerating. I have had numerous history, science, and math teachers tell me that they do not assign essays or include discussion questions on their tests because they don't feel like grading them.  As a result, students learn to write solely for their English classes.  The only exception that I can think of is that our AP U.S. History teacher teaches a great deal of writing, and the format that he teaches for his AP exam essays is different from mine, but I just tell my students how the exams differ and prepare them for being able to write to my specifications.  You can do the same.  It's hard work, but it's worth it if you truly want better results from your students.

It's easy to blame past teachers, etc., but the bottom line is that you need to set standards for your students, identify and model those standards for your students, and grade based on that.  The students who are willing to work hard will meet your standards, and those who are apathetic would not have met any standard any way.

One last note, with so many students depending on TV and poorly written articles for their sources or reading Sparknotes, etc., instead of exemplary writing, our number of fluent writers will continue to decline.