What to Do When Your Students Write Badly

Arnie Sanders, Writing Program Director (x6515)

 I. Tell the Writing Program Director about it.

            If you believe that students who actually earned College Writing Proficiency were not taught to write well enough for your courses, send the Writing Program Director copies of the papers with a copy of the assignment.  Unless you provide that information, there is no way the Writing Program can know there is a problem.  When you communicate with us, you help improve the level of instruction we provide and help us identify weaknesses in our curriculum.  However, before you blame the Writing Program as the cause of the writing you see, please consider some important alternative explanations for the bad writing before you.

 II.  Rule out causes that have nothing to do with freshman composition instruction.

            First, please remember that writing is a skill, like playing tennis, in addition to being a set of things one should know about language and document construction.  No amount of training can prevent even a champion tennis player from playing badly on occasion, though certain kinds of mistakes would seem impossible in an expert’s play. Student writers cannot be inoculated against writing badly even if they have written well in previous settings.  American college culture is filled with opportunities for both tennis players and writers to destroy their games.  Writers may write uncharacteristically badly if they have signed up for too many courses in a semester, have just hit content that is beyond their ability to understand, have just had news of a family catastrophe, have fallen into bad social habits (drinking, drugs, late night gaming), or have over-estimated their skills for a more difficult assignment than they are used to.  When students simply fail to plan enough time to produce a paper, they often write badly.   Above all, before deciding that Writing Program instructors have failed to teach your students well enough, test your assumptions about the writing, itself, and about the writing instruction the students actually have had. 

 III.  Make sure you are aware of the limited but defined writing criteria in the College Writing Proficiency requirement.

            Make certain that you are not expecting writing traits that are not covered by the most recent version of the College Writing Proficiency criteria, which have been available online for almost two decades.  This is the web page URL:

 http://faculty.goucher.edu/writingprogram/goucher_college_writing_proficiency_2003_rev.htm.  We have presented these criteria at faculty meetings several times in the past and the faculty has voted to accept them in their current form as recently as 2006.  If the faculty wishes to change them, it must tell us what changes they desire.[1]  They are intended to be basic sophomore level proficiency criteria.  Those criteria are not sufficient to allow students to graduate in any major because each academic discipline requires differing genres of writing, document formats, rhetorical relations with the intended audience, etc.  That level of instruction is called Writing Proficiency in the Major (WPM).  It is beyond our ability to teach those skills to the current generation of incoming Goucher students in two semesters, although I will work with any major department to help them improve their WPM curriculum.  In freshman composition, we concentrate on teaching the criteria most disciplines hold in common.

 IV.  Discover whether students actually have met the CWP requirement and are not evading it, and consider requiring College Writing Proficiency as a pre-requisite for your upper-division courses.

            Before communicating with the Writing Program Director, you would be doing the students and your colleagues a great favor if you asked the students and their advisors whether the students have met the College Writing Proficiency requirement.  The students whose writing displeases you may not have met the requirement and may be hoping that it makes no difference in their performance.  You can help us to persuade them otherwise.  The Writing Program typically can move roughly seventy-five percent of each year’s cohort of freshman and transfer students to meet the CWP criteria by the end of their second semester, and ninety percent of the cohort to CWP by the end of their third semester.  This leaves behind ten percent who resisted or evaded instruction for various reasons.  That means between thirty and forty students every year will enter their fourth and later semesters without meeting the CWP criteria.  As these students build up in the student body, they constitute a body of up to 100 or more students between sophomore and senior years who may continue taking upper-division courses with you although they are writing very badly.  Some have taken no composition courses at all.  Some take one or more composition courses, fail to meet the criteria, and then do nothing about it.  The Writing Program has no power to force students to do what is necessary to write proficiently even though students cannot graduate without passing the requirement.  Their advisors must be made aware that their advisees’ writing is causing problems so that something will be done about it.  If the students are currently enrolled in English 105 or 106, communicate with the instructor of that course and share your concerns.  If both of you are addressing the same issues, the chances improve that the student will end the semester writing better than s/he started.

            If you find that students frequently write badly in your courses because they have not met the CWP criteria, consider making it a pre-requisite for enrolling in the class.  Any writing-intensive course certainly should do so, but many seminars and difficult 200-level courses require only “sophomore standing” or no prerequisites at all.  Knowing students are sophomores is not a certain indicator of their writing abilities.

 V.  Ask your students in what courses or by what kind of portfolio submission they met the CWP criteria and communicate that to the Writing Program Director.

            If the students say they have meet the CWP criteria, make sure they tell you which section of what course in what semester they did so or in what month they submitted a successful CWP portfolio to the program director.  Successful portfolio writers get an email from the director attesting to that fact, and they are strongly advised to print it for their records.  If there is something wrong with the way they were taught to write, that information will be essential to our figuring out what went wrong. 

 VI.  While waiting for the Writing Program Director’s response, take action to improve your students’ writing by using the Writing Center, incorporating the tutors into your paper assignments, and giving increased attention to writing in your teaching or office hours.

            Take time to explain to your bad writers, in person, what specific aspects of their writing need work.  Do not trust written comments on papers to produce reliable effects on readers who cannot operate the language effectively, themselves.  Then, send those students to the Writing Center.  The Writing Center can help them improve their academic prose style no matter what their major is.  The tutors cannot teach endocrinology or electro-magnetic theory, but they can tell whether a sentence about those topics has a proper subject and verb.  If you have not made use of the Writing Center in the past because you thought your subject matter made your students impossible to tutor, please consider asking your students to use the Center.  This link will take you to the online real-time schedule: http://faculty.goucher.edu/writingcenter/schedule.htm

            You can invite Writing Center tutors to visit your classes briefly at the start of the semester or when papers are assigned so that they can introduce the Center and to explain what tutors can do to help.  Every year we tend to have tutors with majors and minors in the Arts, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities, and specifically trained tutors also have begun to offer bilingual tutoring in Spanish and French.  If we have tutors whose schedules allow it, you can even arrange longer-term assistance in your classes.  This is especially true if you spend any class time helping your students to improve their papers (peer editing workshops, etc.).   Such events can be as short as ten or fifteen minutes and still produce noticeable improvements if you explicitly describe what you do and do not want to be reading in the finished papers, and provide examples of correct and incorrect work.  If you do not devote any class time to helping students improve their papers, please reconsider that decision.  Even a small sacrifice of content delivery to help students address your most important writing requirements will teach them that being able to write clearly about your subject is at least somewhat as important to you as the subject, itself.  Reinforcing the qualities of writing you respect and require in your lesson plans will communicate their importance to your students.

            You can save class time if you are willing to provide sample papers and discussion of them during your office hours.  Some students perform much better when given a clear example of the document their instructors expect, rather than just the instructions which the best students could use to produce such writing.  It is also possible that altering those writing instructions will produce better writing if you articulate more explicitly what you want and the process successful writers typically use to produce it.  Most college teachers never were taught how to design writing assignments.  Well-designed, clearly written prompts are more likely to produce strong papers, although confused and incompetent writers can fail even the best planned assignment.  Try talking with writers whose papers have failed and ask them to diagnose the causes of the papers’ problems. 

            In the mean time, please send the Writing Program Director the papers and your concerns so that the Writing Program can concentrate more effectively on improving our instruction of the writers who should have been better taught.