[Header Photo by John on Unsplash]

I began my career as an educator in 1984, an ominous year for a teacher of English.

During my college years as I was taking education and English courses, culminating in student teaching split between a middle and high school, and then over my first few years of teaching several different course and levels of English as well as journalism, I was vividly aware that I was better prepared to teach literature than writing.

This was especially frustrating for me because I viewed myself as a writer and a teacher of writing.

I worked hard to teach myself how to teach writing better, but much of that effort was beating my head against a wall. The only saving grace was my students wrote often, received a huge amount of feedback, and rewrote probably more than most students in the 1980s.

I was implementing a crude, self-taught writing workshop approach that had roots in Lucy Calkins’s and Nancy Atwell’s early work.

Then, somewhat arrogant and very naive, I was gifted the opportunity to attend the summer 6-week Spartanburg Writing Project, a local version of the National Writing Project. Many years later, as one of the highlights of my career, I was a co-instructor in that very same project.

Something reorienting happened that summer early in my career. The co-director, Brenda Davenport (who taught first-year writing at the university where SWP was housed), essentially took me aside and very sternly told me almost everything I was doing was wrong.

This was one of my early lessons in good intentions and hard work are not enough.

I had been teaching as an uncritical prescriptivist, and Brenda forced me to shift toward a more authentic descriptivist approach to teaching language, one that matched my own linguistics understanding of language.

The irony was that contradiction between who I was a writer/scholar and how I behaved as a teacher.

Mind you, this was just a turning point, but also that experience awakened me to the tremendous gap between what high school students learned about writing in K-12 schooling versus what they needed to be college-level writers.

I have to admit that I wasn’t helping my students be prepared for college writing in the ways they needed.

I was a high school English teacher for 18 years, focusing primarily on teaching my students to write, but I taught a wide range of literature (although significantly focusing on American literature) as well as Advanced Placement Literature and Composition.

Now I am in year 24 as a college professor, and my courses are primarily first-year and upper-level writing.

I am not seeking to judge or blame high school ELA teachers here, but what I am about to share is grounded in my dual careers in high school and higher ed as well as a recognition that high school teachers are put in impossible conditions (teaching literature and writing is too much) and that much of what students learn K-12 is the result of a flawed system, not misguided teachers.

Here, then, are ways college students struggle as writers and how to better prepare them:

• Essay form and the thesis. I recently saw a question on a Facebook page for teachers of AP Language about the thesis (can a thesis be more than one sentence), prompting me to write this post. Some of the earliest lessons we consider in my first-year writing course is that students come to college with narrow and mechanical views of the essay and thesis, often some version of the 5-paragraph essay with a one-paragraph introduction ending with a one-sentence thesis. I work very hard to help students shift to a more authentic view of the essay (there are many kinds and none are the 5-paragraph model) that is grounded in the opening (multiple-paragraphs with the beginning focused on engaging the reader and including a thesis/focus paragraph), the fully developed body that is far more than 3 paragraphs and includes the use of subheads, and the closing (multiple paragraphs and not restating the introduction/opening). Throughout the semester we read published essays and mine them for essay and thesis/focus concepts while also exploring how essays tend to be written by academics and scholars (much of what is expected at the college level). [Here is my first-year writing seminar syllabus/schedule that may be helpful for understanding how we examine the essay as an authentic form.]
• Paragraphing. Another mechanical and inauthentic understanding by students is the paragraph. I usually ask them what they have been required to do in term of paragraphing, and most students have (different) rules for length—from 5-6 sentences to more. The problem I notice is that students write huge paragraphs, and they have no sense of the feel for breaking them in terms of considering the reader. Oddly, these same students admit hating long paragraphs as readers but persist with writing them. One of the most effective essay assignments in my FYW is the hyperlink-cited essay written in online format, using journalism as a guide. Journalism tends toward very short sentences (1-3 per paragraph), helping students develop a better sense of writing for a real audience of readers.
• Chromebooks and Google docs v. Word. While recent and current high school and college students have in fact lived most of their lives as technology natives, that reality hasn’t resulted in their being adept at fully using technology, notably Word. My students have spent K-12 on Chromebooks and working in Google docs, but they seem to know very few of the formatting features and tools a word processor offers a writer. And simply managing and formatting documents is a nearly insurmountable task for my college students. I spend a great deal of time teaching students to use Word, to name and store files, and to navigate features such as spell and grammar check (they don’t use that), track changes, and comments. The Chromebook/Google doc experiences have infantilized students in many ways. Students need the empowering aspects of technology for young writers much earlier, and many of the features in Word support effective writing instruction.
• Submitting essays for feedback. The last point leads to this pet peeve of mine: Students submitting writing in PDFs. In my role as a journal column editor, I have had adults submit writing in PDFs instead of Word files. As noted above, the process of submitting writing, receiving feedback, and submitting revised writing is essential not only to writing instruction but also to the real-world of submitting for publication. That students have been required or allowed to submit work in PDFs has erased for them the recognition that they are sharing a living document that provides an opportunity for teaching and learning (which I discuss in a later point below). For me, the PDF represents the misunderstanding by students that they submit writing that is finished (hence, perfect) instead of the much healthier realization that all writing will and should be revised and improved. In short, in writing, there is no finished line.
• Citation (MLA, APA) and evidence/quoting. I have written at length about quoting here and here, and citations here, here, and here. But I recently received an email from APA that has prompted me to stress this point even further; APA now is the citation format of choice for 80% of college majors (and even English Journal recently switched from MLA to APA). However, most students enter college having had mostly or only experiences with MLA, which often is the citation choice in literature and the field of English. I want to caution that I am not advocating for changing from teaching students MLA to APA in high school. What students need is a broader and conceptual understanding of citation and style guides (experiences with MLA, APA, and Chicago, for example) that help them recognize citation/style is discipline-based and that they should be using the manuals/guides, not trying to memorize any specific format. Included in that more conceptual approach is helping students understand that these guides are not just about how to cite, but also about writing style. For example, students often enter college almost exclusively quoting from their sources, which they dutifully walk the reader through one at a time; this is what I call the “research paper problem.” I have added to my students’ citation resources an in-text checklist from APA; the first two checks prompt students to prefer paraphrasing (a significant stylistic difference from MLA). APA also recommends parenthetical over narrative citation (which I call “writing about your sources instead of your topic” with my students). Similar to the need to address citation at the broader and conceptual level, students need a much more nuanced understanding of providing evidence and incorporating sources in their writing. I stress to students that quoting a source should be reserved for textual analysis only; when using sources to add authority or credibility to their writing, they should use paraphrasing, parenthetical citation, and synthesize multiple sources when possible. For example, “Another prominent discourse on AI in schools argues that AI should be used to prepare students for an AI-dominated workforce, framing AI as an essential skill for success (Anderson, 2025; Boles, 2025; McDowell, 2025; Ta & West, 2024).”
• Writing process, feedback, and revision. What K-12 students need more than anything in terms of learning to write is being given as many opportunities to write by choice as possible and to have that writing disentangled as much as possible from grading while also being embedded in the writing process. My college students are often paralyzed as writers because they want their submissions to be perfect the first submission and they often see all feedback as “mean” or personal attacks. Many high-achieving students come out of Advanced Placement culture where their writing instruction has been heavily focused on one-draft writing for the AP tests as well as bound to prompts and rubrics (my next point). Students need to become comfortable with drafting their writing, receiving feedback, and not see the writing process as something to “finish.” One way I help them see this is by sharing my own experiences as a published scholar; for example, this folder of the “Scholarly Essay Process” that shows my own submission and feedback for a chapter in an edited volume (still in process).
• Prompts and rubrics v. choice and writer’s decisions. And since I mentioned AP testing, another way students have been infantilized in K-12 writing experiences is that nearly all of their writing has been to other people’s prompts and then guided/assessed by other people’s rubrics. I have also written at length against the use of rubrics (here, here, and here). In short, writing prompts and rubrics often serve the needs of testing and assessment, but these mechanisms are also doing the work for a writer that students need to be doing themselves. The realities of testing will not leave K-12 education any time soon so teachers would be negligent not to continue some use of prompts and rubrics; however, students as emerging writers need far more experiences with writing in authentic ways and by making the choices themselves that prompts and rubrics provide.
• Essay assignment as teaching/learning experiences v. assessment. I have been a non-grader most of my teaching career over 5 decades; I also do not give tests. Recently, because having a non-graded classroom is very disorienting for students, I have moved to grade contracts to separate student writing and assignments from the tyranny of grades. The FYW contract now includes this key statement: “Assignments serve as teaching/learning experiences and not as forms of assessment.” I want my students to see their essays and the submission/writing process for what they are—mechanisms for individualized teaching and learning. I continue to see this tension (seeing writing submissions as ways to be graded versus ways to learn) as the most difficult hurdle in my courses. Students routinely become angry or even disconnect because they are required (and allowed) to revise and resubmit their writing. While I am closer to the end of my career than the beginning, this remains my central goal as a teacher of writing, to help students embrace the writing process as a teaching/learning experience and not a way for me to grade them.

Recently on social media, I acknowledged that K-12 teaching is far more demanding than teaching in higher ed so this post isn’t offered as a criticism of K-12 teachers or yet another way to ask more of K-12 teachers.

I recognize in teachers at all levels, however, a desire to serve our students better, and I think some of what I am sharing here may give context to what teaching to adjust, discontinue, or revise in that pursuit of fostering in our students a goal I believe is essential—becoming eager and more effective writers and thinkers.

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