 Home

 Regional Sites

 Educators

 DLD/Upstanders-Bystanders

 #CWPLeader

Because writing matters for success in the school and university, in the
community and the workplace, the California Writing Project has a central
mission—to improve student writing and learning by improving the teaching of
writing.

Writing is essential to learning in every academic subject.

 Emphasizing writing improvement and writing to improve learning in all subject

areas was key to the success of the 90/90/90 case study schools—schools with
high achievement, high minority enrollment, and high poverty levels. --D.
Reeves, Accountability in Action: A Blueprint for Learning

 “Schools that harness writing as an essential tool for learning know the benefits
of giving students the skills and confidence to be better writers.” --Because
Writing Matters: Improving Student Writing in Our Schools

Writing is the principal tool available to us for clarifying and refining our thoughts.

 “Writing, properly understood, is thought on paper.... The reward of disciplined

writing is a mind prepared to think.” --The Neglected “R”: The Need for a Writing
Revolution

Writing is a way of engaging the imagination as an ally in learning.

 “Because writing can support a high level of learning in all core subjects, it
matters in any classroom where inquiry, knowledge, and expression are valued
and recognized by students and teachers.” Because Writing Matters: Improving
Student Writing in Our Schools
Writing enhances proficiency in reading. Writing analytically about one’s reading
enhances comprehension, application, and critical thought.

 “Writing helps students become better readers and thinkers. It can help students
reflect critically about the information and ideas they must understand and make
use of both in academia and in the world outside its doors.” --Because Writing
Matters: Improving Student Writing in Our Schools
 “83% of college faculty say that the lack of analytical reading skills contributes to
a students’ lack of success in a course.” Faculty also say that “only about 1/3 of
entering college students are sufficiently prepared for the two most frequently
assigned writing tasks: analyzing information or arguments and synthesizing
information from several sources.” --Academic Literacy: A Statement of
Competencies Expected of Students Entering California’s Public Colleges and
Universities
 When English learners are invited to engage in high-level analytical writing, they
demonstrate dramatic growth in critical thinking and extended discourse.
 In studying the growth in literacy of English learners, writing has been shown to
be a tool for slowing things down with students, so they can examine the
language. “Written language makes language available for students in a way oral
language doesn’t.” Having language available in print makes it easier for EL
students to examine language. When students write, ”that examination is made
even more concrete” than when they read. --P. David Pearson in Because Writing
Matters: Improving Student Writing in Our Schools
 “We must be careful not to confuse the limitations of language with the
limitations of cognition.... As primary goals for the academic writing curriculum,”
English learners, “like their native-speaking counterparts, need to be taught to
read critically and to incorporate information from secondary sources in their
writing, i.e., to paraphrase, summarize, and quote effectively from background
texts. Further, a focus on helping” English learners “ to develop critical or
analytical thinking abilities should be a top priority.” --D. Brinton, L. Sasser, B.
Winningham in Teaching Analytical Writing

Writing is the principal instrument for documenting academic competence.

 Whether by course exam, essay, senior project, portfolio of work, entrance or

placement exam, writing is the primary way students demonstrate what they
have learned and often what they are capable of learning.
 “Faculty judge students’ ability to express their thinking clearly, accurately, and
compellingly through their writing. College faculty look for evidence in papers
that students are stretching their minds, representing others’ ideas responsibly,
and exploring ideas.” --Academic Literacy: A Statement of Competencies
Expected of Students Entering California’s Public Colleges and Universities

Writing is the principal gatekeeper skill for entrance into college.

 According to university research studies, proficiency in writing is statistically the

best single predictor of academic success in the first year of college.
Writing is a threshold skill for employment and advancement in the workplace.

 Surveys of leading corporations show that 80% or more of salaried employees (as
opposed to hourly employees) have some responsibilities for writing.
 According to most corporate leaders, employees who are skilled in writing are the
most likely to be promoted and the least likely to be outsourced or eliminated.
 “More than 90 percent of mid-career professionals recently cited the ‘need to
write effectively’ as a skill ‘of great importance’ in their day-to-day work.”
 Highly successful leaders in every business and profession believe that their skill
in writing contributed significantly to their success. --Writing: A Ticket to
Work...or a Ticket Out, A Survey of Business Leaders

“Writing is a gateway to students’ emerging role in our nation’s future as participants

and decision makers in a democratic society.” --Because Writing Matters: Improving
Student Writing in Our Schools

Writing is the most powerful tool available to human beings for examining, reflecting on,
and finding meaning in their own history and experience.

Writing is an essential tool for recording and preserving human history and scientific
knowledge.

“From poetry to letters to stories to laws, we must learn to write in order to participate
in the range of experiences available to us as human beings. In a very real way, neither
our democracy nor our personal freedoms will survive unless we as citizens take the time
needed to learn how to write.” --Bob Kerrey, former Senator and leader of the five-year
Writing Challenge to the Nation

“For students of color, the ability to write offers not only a chance for a better life, but a
voice, and a way of expressing identity. Writing can enable those students, who are
often marginalized by society, to move from the periphery to the center of
society. Those who are able to write can contribute their ideas to the public discourse....
In a culture as diverse as ours, it is crucial that all groups and all strata of society be
able to articulate their perspectives.” --Ronald A. Williams, “A Skill Essential to
Progress: Writing, Race, and Education, A Community College Perspective”

Current Research in the Teaching of Writing:

 Improving writing is crucial to learning in all subject areas, not just English.
 Reading and writing are reinforcing literacy skills and need to be taught together.
 Learning to write requires frequent, supportive practice.
 Students have diverse abilities and instructional needs, and so teachers must use
multiple strategies to improve students’ writing.
 Effective writing instruction pays attention to both the product and processes of
writing.
 Writing should be taught in school much as it is practiced by professional writers:
that is, students should write for authentic purposes to real audiences.
 Students face ongoing challenges in their writing development and need practice
with diverse writing tasks to improve.
  Simply assigning more writing is not enough; teachers must teach students such
skills as how to organize thoughts, develop ideas, and revise for clarity.
 An effective writing assignment does more than ask students to report what they
have read or experienced. It engages students in such processes as problem
solving, reflecting, analyzing, and imagining so that they can think critically about
what they have read or experienced.
 Schools cannot improve writing without teachers and administrators who value,
understand, and practice writing themselves.
 Teachers and schools need to develop common expectations for good writing
across grade levels and subject areas.
 Schools and districts need to develop fair and authentic writing assessments that
are aligned with high standards and reflect student progress beyond single-test
evaluations.
 Effective school-wide writing programs involve the entire faculty and are
developed across the curriculum.
 Schools and districts need to offer professional development opportunities in
teaching writing to all faculty.

--Because Writing Matters: Improving Student Writing in Our Schools

 What Makes Writing So Important?
 Writing is the primary basis upon which your work, your learning, and your
intellect will be judged—in college, in the workplace, and in the community.

 Writing expresses who you are as a person.

 Writing is portable and permanent. It makes your thinking visible.

 Writing helps you move easily among facts, inferences, and opinions without
getting confused—and without confusing your reader.

 Writing promotes your ability to pose worthwhile questions.

 Writing fosters your ability to explain a complex position to readers, and to

yourself.

 Writing helps others give you feedback.

 Writing helps you refine your ideas when you give others feedback.

 Writing requires that you anticipate your readers’ needs. Your ability to do so
demonstrates your intellectual flexibility and maturity.

 Writing ideas down preserves them so that you can reflect upon them later.

 Writing out your ideas permits you to evaluate the adequacy of your argument.

 Writing stimulates you to extend a line of thought beyond your first impressions
or gut responses.

 Writing helps you understand how truth is established in a given discipline.

 Writing equips you with the communication and thinking skills you need to
participate effectively in democracy.

 Writing is an essential job skill.

~based upon brochures from Brown University

and the University of Missour
 Tomorrow's Professor Postings
Online faculty development 100 times per year.
 WELCOME
 POSTINGS
 STATISTICS
 SUBSCRIBE
 FEEDBACK
 RICK REIS
 THE BOOK
 HELPFUL LINKS
 VPTL

Strategies to Improve Student Writing

Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning
Message Number:
1063
We have known for some time why our students do not write well. And we have known
for some time how to correct the problem. We must give our students many more
opportunities to write, using a pedagogy with the following characteristics:

Folks:

The posting below discusses some important ways to help students improve their writing. It is
by David Smit of Kansas State University and is from POD-DEA Center Notes on Instruction
series. POD is the Professional and Organizational Development Network
[http://www.podnetwork.org/] and the iDEA Center is a nonprofit organization whose mission is
to serve colleges and universities committed to improving learning, teaching, and leadership
performance.[http://www.theideacenter.org/] ©2010 The IDEA Center. Reprinted with
permission.

Note: This posting is longer than most but since it is the last one of 2010 I wanted to be sure
all of you had enough to read of the holidays

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: TBD

Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning

 ------------------------------------- 4,252 words ------------------------------

Strategies to Improve Student Writing

IDEA PAPER #48

"Language is acquired only by absorption and contact with an environment in which language
is in perpetual use." - Samuel Thurber (1898, paraphrased in Judy & Judy, 1981, p. 18)

The Crisis in Writing

Of course we want our students to write well. And we know from our own classes, as well as
from newspaper articles and television specials, that our students do not write as well as we
think they should. The latest report of The National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP) - which conducts the most careful test of the writing abilities of students in grades four,
eight, and 12 - reports that only 16 percent of eighth-graders can write informatively at the level
of "skillful" or better, and that only 26 percent of 12th-graders can write persuasively at that
level. However, between 60 percent and 70 percent of both groups can produce writing that the
NAEP labels "sufficient" (National Center for Education Statistics, 2007, pp. 30, 44). These
results may confirm our worst fears.

Reasons to Question the "Crisis"

However, there are many reasons to think that the "crisis" in writing is more a function of our
attitudes and expectations than it is a result of how our students actually write.

For one thing, we need to remember that the NAEP does not use a normed test. Indeed, there
are no national norms or standards to help us determine what students at various ages should
be able to accomplish in writing, with or without schooling. As a result, we have little basis
other than our own expectations for deciding how well our students write.

In addition, writing is extremely complex, so we have no common standard for what we mean
when we say that our students do not write well. Depending on circumstances, we may mean
1) that our students' writing is not well thought out, 2) that it is not clearly organized, 3) that it is
not well documented or that it needs more detail or evidence, 4) that it needs to be better
edited, 5) that it needs a more appropriate tone, 6) that it needs to be better adapted to the
situation for which it was written, or simply 7) that it needs to be "clearer," whatever that may
mean.

As a result, we often disagree about what constitutes good writing. In a major study of 300
essays read by 53 readers in six different fields - English, social science, and natural science
teachers; editors; lawyers; and business executives - Paul Diederich (1974, p. 6) found that
101 essays "received every grade from 1 to 9 [the entire range possible]; 94 percent received
either seven, eight, or nine different grades."

A final reason for thinking that the crisis in writing is a function of our attitudes is that the crisis
has remained remarkably stable for over 100 years. Indeed, the crisis began with the rise of
mass education at the end of the 19th century. For example, in 1898, the Subject A
Examination at the University of California, a precursor of today's writing tests, indicated that
30 percent to 40 percent of those taking the test were not proficient in written English, a
number very similar to the number of those who do not do well on today's tests. Yet "in 1890
3.5 percent of all seventeen-year-olds graduated from high school; by 1970 the number was
75.6 percent" (Rose, 1989, p. 6). It seems that the percentage of students "deficient" in English
has remained about the same, while we have been educating a much higher percentage of the
population at the high school level.
 The Most Obvious Reason Why Our Students Do Not Write Well Enough

The reasons for our students' inability to write well enough to meet our expectations are many
and varied. Many of us blame television, or the Internet, or the lack of homework in school, or
the breakup of the nuclear family. However, the most obvious reason that our students do not
write well is that they receive a limited amount of instruction in writing and they do not write
very much. Arthur Applebee and Judith Langer (2006, p. 2) report that "two-thirds of students
in Grade 8, for example, are expected to spend an hour or less on writing for homework each
week, and 40% of twelfth graders report never or hardly ever being asked to write a paper of 3
pages or more." When students do write, they tend to write a limited range of genres: mostly
reports, summaries, or analyses. In English classes, they may write a few stories or poems.
They do little persuasive writing at all.

There are few studies of the writing students do in college. In one survey (Thaiss & Porter,
2010), 568 colleges and universities in the United States had some form of writing- across-the-
curriculum that required at least one upper- level writing course after the first year, but it is not
clear how much students wrote in these courses, the kinds of writing they did, or how they
were taught. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) (2009, p. 34) reports that in
its participating institutions, as many as 53 percent of first-year students and 44 percent of
seniors write between one and four papers from five to 19 pages each in an academic year.
However, the great majority of students write papers of five pages or less. The NSSE report
provides no information about the nature of these papers or how students are taught.

My general impression from talking to colleagues in writing studies from around the country is
that in most colleges and universities, students write very little, and when they do write, they
write short analytic or evaluative reports, for which they receive little instruction. They are
simply told to produce a paper that meets a list of requirements by a certain date, and are
graded on how well they meet the instructor's expectations.

If we are going to improve the writing of our students, we will need to require our students to
write more often so that they can get sufficient practice; we will need to actually teach our
students how to write the papers we require of them; and we will need to ensure that they get a
range of experience writing a variety of genres so that they can see how complex writing is and
how writing varies depending on the context, the genre, and the audience. Perhaps most
importantly, we will need to design our writing instruction in ways that will help our students
transfer what they have learned in school to the writing they do in the world outside of school.

Writing to Learn

One way that instructors can promote fluency in writing is by requiring students to use what
Stephen Tchudi (1986, p. 20) calls workaday writing, or writing to learn. There is some
evidence that particular kinds of workaday writing may also reinforce certain kinds of learning
and help students learn the content of their courses (Langer & Applebee, 1987). Note-taking,
for example, may help students focus on the main ideas of the course, and journals and mini-
essays may help students reflect on the content of the course and integrate that knowledge
into larger conceptual schemes (Smit, 2004, pp. 108- 110).

The advantages of incorporating workaday writing into content courses are that:

1. "It is generally short and impromptu, not requiring large amounts of student or class time.

2. It is written primarily for the benefit of the writer as an aide to clarifying experience; thus,

3. It does not require extensive instructor commentary and response (theme correcting)"
(Tchudi, 1986, p. 20).

Workaday writing includes the following activities:

Note-taking, which requires students to not only take careful notes, but to reflect critically on
what they have heard or read. For example, students might be asked to respond to lectures or
reading by answering these kinds of questions:

 What did you already know about this material?

 What is new to you?
 Does anything contradict what you already knew?
 Does anything expand or provide more evidence for what you already knew?
 What don't you understand?
 What support does the speaker or writer give for his or her facts?
 What patterns of reasoning does the speaker or writer offer as evidence?
 Have you encountered reasoning like this before? If so, where? Are these patterns typical
of the discipline as a whole?

Journals, which require students to write extensively several times a week, summarizing what
they have learned, and raising issues and problems. Teachers may use the same sort of guide
questions for journals as they use for note-taking.

Microthemes - mini-essays on five-inch by eight-inch cards - which require students to write

summaries, support theses, pose questions, work with data, and provide support for
generalizations (Tchudi, 1986, pp. 24-25). Here is a sample microtheme assignment for an
introductory physics class (Bean et al., 1982, p. 35):

Suppose that you are Dr. Science, the question-and- answer person for a popular magazine
called Practical Science. Readers of your magazine are invited to submit letters to Dr. Science,
who answers them in "Dear Abby" style in a special section of the magazine. One day you
receive the following letter:

Dear Dr. Science, You've got to help me settle this argument I am having with my girlfriend.
We were watching a baseball game several weeks ago when this guy hit a pop-up straight up
over the catcher's head. When it finally came down, the catcher caught it standing on home
plate. Well, my girlfriend told me that when the ball stopped in midair just before it started back
down, its velocity was zero, but acceleration was not zero. I said she was stupid. If something
isn't moving at all, how could it have any acceleration? Ever since then she has been making a
big deal out of this and won't let me kiss her.... You've got to explain it so we both understand,
because my girlfriend is really dogmatic. She said she wouldn't even trust Einstein unless
he could explain himself clearly.

Sincerely, Baseball Blues

Can This Relationship Be Saved? Your task is to write an answer to Baseball Blues.
Because space in your magazine is limited, restrict your answer to what can be put on a single
5" X 8" card. Don't confuse Baseball and his girlfriend by using any special physics terms
unless you explain clearly what those terms mean. If you think some diagrams would help,
include them on a separate sheet.

Workaday writing gives students the opportunity to write in order to clarify for themselves what
they are learning and why. It also gives teachers a chance to quickly determine how well the
students can use the terms and concepts being taught in their courses. Because workaday
writing is short and informal, it does not need to be graded, and teachers can read many
responses in relatively little time. And if teachers think it helpful, they can use workaday writing
to conduct a dialogue with individual students.

Students may also do workaday writing for each other, either for small study groups or for the
class as a whole. Such a pedagogy, called distributed cognition (Brown et al., 1993), requires
students to share information with each other so that they have access to and learn more than
they could on their own or by simply listening to lectures. Writing for study groups or the entire
class might include reports, abstracts, and summaries that students could share as study
guides for tests. Or students could write letters, interviews, class newsletters, annotated
bibliographies, and evaluations that provide the class with information they could not research
on their own.

Writing Rhetorically

Workaday writing can be very useful for students while in school. However, when we talk about
how well our students write, we generally are not referring to how well they write genres that
may help their classroom learning. When we say that we want our students to write well, we
usually mean that we want them to write well not just in school, but also on the job and in their
lives after they graduate. This means that our instruction must help students to think
rhetorically; that is, we must teach our students how to adapt their writing in different genres to
different audiences and social contexts.

Overwhelmingly, the academic pedagogies that seem to best prepare students to think about
these and other aspects of writing are called structured learning or strategy instruction, both of
which involve goal-setting, teaching students specific strategies to help them accomplish some
aspect of planning or composing, and organizing a "pleasant, supportive, and collaborative"
learning environment (Graham, 2006, p. 188). One specific example of structured learning is
what George Hillocks (1986, p. 122) calls the environmental mode, which has the following
characteristics:

1. Clear and specific objectives. For a laboratory in chemistry, a specific objective might be the
accurate reporting of data in a certain format.

2. Materials and problems to engage students with each other in specifiable processes
important to writing. To give students practice in reporting data, they might be given sets of
data and asked to interpret the data and write up the results in a specified format.

3. Activities with a great deal of peer interaction, in order to give students practice in working
on problems cooperatively, and to make the work engaging.

In a massive meta-statistical study of the effectiveness of various strategies for teaching

writing, Hillocks (1986) found that the environmental mode and a companion strategy called
focus on inquiry were by far the most beneficial pedagogies for improving writing. Hillocks'
results have been confirmed 20 years later in a similar meta-analysis by Steven Graham
(2006, pp. 204-205).

Unfortunately, there is also considerable evidence that the writing students do in school does
not necessarily prepare them adequately to write outside of school. Writing on the job or for
other rhetorical situations in public life demands that writers confront a host of contextual
difficulties they did not face in school when they only had to write a standard "school genre" for
the teacher. Outside of school, writers must write new genres with conventions they are not
familiar with; they must deal with multiple audiences that are difficult to conceptualize; and they
must confront the ways documents circulate among various organizations and constituencies,
and the ways members of these groups contribute to the composing of documents (Beaufort,
2006, pp. 229-230).

Whether we can help students transfer their learning from our classes to other contexts is still a
matter of debate, but there is some evidence that the following strategies can enhance transfer
and efficiency of learning in new social contexts (Beaufort, 2007, pp. 151-152):

1. Teachers can help students "structure specific problems and learnings into more abstract
principles that can be applied in new situations."
2. Teachers can provide opportunities for students "to apply abstract concepts in different
social contexts."

3. Teachers can promote "the practice of mindfulness, or meta-cognition."

In order to incorporate structured learning and to promote the transfer of learning into our
teaching of rhetorical writing, we might consider using the following sequence of steps
(adapted from Tchudi, 1986, pp. 30-37):

1. Decide on how teaching a specific set of writing skills can fit into and reinforce the larger
objectives for the content course.

2. Decide on a rhetorical situation and an identifiable genre used outside the classroom that
will give students practice using these skills. Such rhetorical situations give students a potential
audience, real or imagined; a genre, such as a business letter or a report, with a set of
conventions that must be modified in each new context; and a role to play so that they can
think about matters of style, tone, and evidence when addressing a specific audience.

3. Give students opportunities to reflect on audience, genre, and context during the writing
process. Direct their attention to how their style, organization, and evidence should be based
on the knowledge and expectations of their audience and the conventions of the chosen genre.

4. Create one or more focused activities that require students to demonstrate the course
objectives. Put the requirements for the activity on an evaluation form or checklist so that
students can see what they must accomplish.

5. Help students through the writing process as necessary. This might involve something as
simple as checking an early plan to make sure that students are on the right track. It might
mean devoting a class period to small-group workshops in which students read and respond to
each other's work. It might involve individual conferences with students to go over early drafts.

6. Grade, evaluate, or respond to the writing by commenting on what the writer did well and by
concentrating on two or three ways that the writer could most improve the paper. Avoid long
lists of errors. There is considerable evidence that teacher comments are not effective in and
of themselves. To be effective, teacher comments need to reinforce the main focus of the
instruction, providing feedback on matters that have been previously taught or skills that have
been previously practiced (Hillocks, 1986, pp. 167-168).

Here is how such a pedagogical strategy might work for a course in American history. To
begin, the teacher might set as the content objective: The students will be able to list the
possible causes of the Revolutionary War and discuss in detail the arguments for and against
the various causes. The real-world genres in which this objective is made concrete might be a
journal of popular history, a feature story in the Sunday supplement of a newspaper celebrating
the Fourth of July, or an editorial in a newspaper celebrating a facet of contemporary life that
has resulted from the way the revolution changed the country. Here is a possible assignment
for our hypothetical American history teacher:

Choose one possible cause, or series of causes, for the Revolutionary War. For a magazine
devoted to making history available to general readers, such as American Heritage, explain
and provide the evidence to support one major cause of the American Revolution. Clearly
document the sources of your evidence, using a form of documentation appropriate to the
magazine. Be sure to meet any objections to your evidence. Here is the evaluation form that
we will use when we read your paper:

Name: Reader:
At the beginning of your article, the claim about a possible cause of the Revolutionary War is
clearly stated or implied.

yes no sort of

Your evidence is clear and convincing.

yes no sort of

You cite possible objections to your claims and adequately refute them.

yes no sort of

You use an appropriate form of documentation consistently.

yes no sort of

Comments:

In order to prepare students to do this assignment, the American history teacher should also
give students practice in how to accomplish the major objectives of the assignment. In this
case, the teacher might give the class a list of facts and figures about the ownership of
property among the delegates at the Constitutional Convention; divide the class into groups of
three or four; and ask each group to prepare a brief position paper, arguing for or against the
claim that the Revolutionary War was fought in order to protect the property of the landed
gentry. The point of such activities is to involve students in thinking about the objectives of the
course and to give them practice in using the kinds of evidence and reasoning they will need to
use in their writing for the course.

In order to help students through the writing process, the American history teacher might do
any combination of the following:

 Have the students brainstorm possible ideas for their papers in class and share their ideas
aloud so that the teacher can comment on them and clarify what an acceptable paper
might look like.

 Ask students to submit plans for the paper ahead of time so that the teacher can see
whether the students are on track and give them some brief suggestions on how to
improve their basic ideas and the organization of those ideas.

 Once the students have a first draft, divide the class into groups of three or four, and have
each group read and comment on each other's papers using an evaluation form or
checklist based on the specific goals of the assignment. Such peer review not only gives
students a number of varied responses to their writing; it also gives them the opportunity to
critically analyze the writing of others and practice the kinds of analysis they need to use
with their own papers.
 At every stage, have students reflect aloud or in writing about who they are writing to, the
conventions of the genre they are writing, and the contextual factors that might influence
how their papers could be understood or misunderstood. Also have them discuss how the
elements of the writing process might be different in different situations. If they can,
teachers might also draw the students' attention to how the rhetorical situation and the
genre of the assignment are similar to and different from other writing the students have
done. Such meta-cognitive thinking may be the primary skill necessary for the student to
transfer what they learn about writing in American history class to writing outside of school.

Lastly, the American history teacher needs to respond to the writing she has assigned by
praising what the student has done well, and, if necessary, by requiring that the student revise
the paper to make it better. In suggesting how the student should revise, the teacher should
use what Cy Knoblauch and Lil Brannon (1984, p. 129) call facilitative commentary: 1) she
should allow the writer to control the discourse, 2) she should use negotiation and dialogue on
the assumption that the writer knows his own purposes better than any reader, and 3) she
should play the part of a reader who knows the effect the writer had on her - even better than
the writer does. This negotiation should promote a richer meaning of the text.

Instead of saying, "Don't do it your way; do it this way," the teacher should say or imply,
"Here's what your choices have caused me to think you're saying - if my response differs from
your intent, how can you help me to see what you mean?" Instead of writing in the margin,
"You have no evidence for this assertion. Cut it out," the teacher should ask, "On what basis
are you making this assertion?" The point is to give students practice in the kinds of thinking
that writing requires. If in her comments a teacher simply tells her students what to do, all her
students will get is practice in following directions.

The Bottom Line

We have known for some time why our students do not write well. And we have known for
some time how to correct the problem. We must give our students many more opportunities to
write, using a pedagogy with the following characteristics:

1. Assignments that provide a rhetorical situation for the writing task: a purpose, a genre, an
audience, and a discussion of the contextual factors that may produce effective communication
in this particular situation.

2. An emphasis on the process of writing: providing instruction in (and sufficient time for)
getting ideas, planning, writing drafts, analyzing their drafts, revising, and editing.

3. Opportunities for students to practice the skills

necessary to fulfill the major purpose of the writing

task.

4. Focused responses to students' drafts that include comments on how well the draft meets
the demands of the assignment, and one or two ways to improve other matters, such as
organization or editing.

5. Meta-cognitive reflection on the genre conventions, the audience, and the contextual factors
of the rhetorical situation, especially ways in which these factors are similar to and different
from other writing that students have done.

Just as important, we must recognize that students cannot get sufficient practice in writing if
they only write in English classes. Writing needs to be the responsibility of colleges and
universities as a whole. But for us to teach writing effectively across the curriculum, we need
smaller classes and teachers who are trained to teach writing effectively in academic
disciplines outside of English. Thus, the solution to the "crisis" in writing is not only educational.
It is also social and political. We must insist in our departments - and in other departments
across our colleges and universities - that writing is important enough to be taught throughout
the curriculum. And we must constantly remind the public media, funding agencies, college
governing boards, and university boards of trustees that we need smaller classes so that, first,
we can require our students to write more often and, second, we can give their writing the
attention it deserves. With appropriate financial support and curricular reforms, we can indeed
begin to deal with the crisis in writing.

--------------------

David Smit is a professor of English at Kansas State University, where he directed the
Expository Writing Program for 10 years and where he now teaches an upper-level writing
course for non-English majors and a writing course for secondary-education majors. He has
published numerous articles on style, portfolio assessment, and rhetorical theory. In his book
The End of Composition Studies (2004), Smit argues that in colleges and universities, writing
should be taught in academic disciplines across the curriculum by people trained to write the
genres related to those disciplines.

References and Suggested Readings

The references below, preceded by an asterisk, are suggested readings for those interested in
a general introduction to teaching writing.

Applebee, A.N. & Langer, J.A. (2006). The state of writing instruction in America's schools:
What existing data tell us. Albany, NY: Center on English Learning & Achievement.
http://www.albany. edu/cela/.

Bean, J.C., Drenk, D., & Lee, F.D. (1982). Microtheme strategies for developing cognitive
skills. In C.W. Griffin (Ed.), Teaching writing in all disciplines: New directions for teaching and
learning, No. 12 (pp. 27-38). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Beaufort, A. (2006). Writing in the professions. In P. Smagorinsky (Ed.), Research on

composition: Multiple perspectives on two decades of change (pp. 217-242). New York, NY:
Teachers College Press.

Beaufort, A. (2007). College writing and beyond. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

Brown, A.L., Ash, D., Rutherford, M., Nakagawa, K., Gordon, A., & Campione, J.C. (1993).
Distributed expertise in the classroom. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions:
Psychological and educational considerations (pp. 188-228). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

Diederich, P.B. (1974). Measuring growth in English. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers
of English.

Graham, S. (2006). Strategy instruction and the teaching of writing. In C. MacArthur, S.

Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.). Handbook of writing research (pp. 187-207). New York, NY:
Guilford Press.

Hillocks, G., Jr. (1986). Research on written composition. Urbana, IL: National Council of
Teachers of English.

Judy, S.N. & Judy, S.J. (1981). An introduction to the teaching of writing. New York, NY: John
Wiley.
Knoblauch, C.H. & Brannon, L. (1984). Rhetorical traditions and the teaching of writing.
Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook.

Langer, J.A., & Applebee, A.N. (1987). How writing shapes thinking: A study of teaching and
learning. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

*Lindemann, E. (2001). A rhetoric for writing teachers. (4th ed.). New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2007). The nation's report card: Writing. Washington,
DC.

National Survey of Student Engagement. (2009). Assessment for Improvement: Tracking

student engagement over time. Annual results. Washington, DC.

Rose, M. (1989). Lives on the boundary. New York, NY: Penguin.

Smit, D.W. (2004). The end of composition studies. Carbondale, IL:

Southern Illinois University Press.

Tchudi, S.N. (1986). Teaching writing in the content areas: College

level. New York, NY: National Education Association.

Thaiss, C. & Porter, T. (2010). The state of WAC/WID in 2010: Methods and results of the U.S.
Survey of the International WAC/ WID Mapping Project. College Composition and
Communication, 61 (3), 534-570.

Thurber, S. (1898). An address to English teachers. Education, 18, 516-526.

*Williams, J.D. (2003). Preparing to teach writing: Research, theory, and practice. (3rd ed.).
New York, NY: Routledge.