[Header Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash]

Having taught now an on-going 41 years—about half that time as a high school English teacher and now a college professor—if there is one thing I know very well, it is the student.

While I love teaching and my students, there is also one thing I have worked diligently to discourage, young people in classrooms performing like students.

Most student behavior is artificial (hand raising to speak, sitting in neat rows, walking in single-file lines) and often dehumanizing (asking permission to go to the bathroom). And since the core of my work as a teacher has focused on teaching writing, few aspects of being a student are worse than writing like a student.

Much of my writing instruction focuses on moving students away from writing like students and toward writing like scholars (or, ideally, like writers).

While I cringe a bit focusing with the negative, let’s consider what writing like a student looks like (and what young writers should avoid):

Starting essays with and punctuating the discussion throughout with Big Claims that are often inaccurate or mostly empty and then nearly never proven or cited.

One of the best examples of this rhetorical patterns is from The Onion: “For as far back as historians can go, summer vacations have been celebrated by people everywhere as a time for rest and relaxation.”

Many students are drawn to the “throughout history” claims or framing a topic as “people have always debated,” “many people today debate,” or this topic is “controversial.” Scholars and writers avoid the Big Claims and especially the “throughout history,” “debate,” or “controversy” framing of a topic.

Student writing is often too big and overstated while scholars tend to work in very small and nuanced spaces around a topic; students seek to draw definitive and black-and-white conclusions while scholars deal in questions to be considered and reach tentative conclusions that are qualified.

Writing about doing the writing or research assignment.

Student papers are often filled with references to being a student writing an essay: “The sources I analyzed show,” “In the essay, I am going to,” “The research that I found explains,” “Most of the sources used,” “Many articles and papers done on these topics,” etc.

While there may be some charm to this accidental postmodernist approach to writing (alas, most students are not Kurt Vonnegut intruding on his own fiction narrative), for students, these meta-writing rhetorical moves do not accomplish anything substantive for the purpose of the essay or the content; these phrases simply add to the word count as empty calories.

For example consider the following and the revision (by removing the meta-writing, the word counts drops, and the writing is more direct and clear):

Student writing: Extensive scientific research has been conducted to determine if ADHD is the result of genetics or environmental factors. While this research has shown some correlation between certain genes or environmental factors and the onset of ADHD, the results remain inconclusive (Thapar et al., 2012).

Revised: While some correlation exists between certain genes or environmental factors and the onset of ADHD, the results remain inconclusive (Thapar et al., 2012).

[Note that students can and should use “I” in writing when first person is appropriate and drives the content and purpose of the essay. Typically, students are apt to use “I” in empty and performative ways instead of powerfully and appropriately.]

In cited writing assignments, producing a very narrow form of the “research paper.”

I now include on essay assignments “Do not write a research paper on …” as part of the assignment. The artificial “research paper” that many students have acquired from K-12 schooling is a mechanical and prompted essay form that results in students writing about their sources instead of writing a purposeful essay with a clear audience: “One article I read pushed for dialogue in their congregational community surrounding the mental health of black parishioners.”

Also, as another example: “John Dewey (1953) wrote a book about progressive education. In his book, Dewey (1953) states, ‘The educator is responsible for a knowledge of individuals and for a knowledge of subject-matter that will enable activity ties to be selected which lend themselves to social organization, an organization in which all individuals have an opportunity to contribute something, and in which the activities in which all participate are the chief carrier of control’ (pp. 23-24).”

Many students simply walk the reader through their “sources” one-by-one, essentially writing about their sources and not their topic. This includes text that increases word count and nothing else, empty calories: “Various studies and scholarly research conducted surrounding the pipeline expose the oppressive and discriminatory systems and beliefs involving law enforcement and unforgiving disciplinary policies within schools that are continually pushing students, especially students of color, out of schools.”

Consider a more direct and powerful version: “Oppressive and discriminatory systems and beliefs involving law enforcement and unforgiving disciplinary policies within schools are continually pushing students, especially students of color, out of schools.”

Excessive or inappropriate quoting.

You may be noticing a trend here since a great deal of what makes something “student writing” increases word count without contributing to the content of the writing.

Excessive and inappropriate quoting is a hallmark of student writing grounded in learning to cite and provide evidence in their writing primarily in their high school English classes where they are using MLA and often doing textual analysis (literary analysis).

Students have learned in the context of literary analysis for English courses that the (only) way to prove a point is by quoting. This is essentially true when writing textual analysis, but students turn that into a universal technique whereby they quote excessively from sources in all types of writing.

And thus, students (as noted above) simply write about their sources, quoting excessively from each and providing little of their own thoughts and almost no synthesis of information. One of the most ineffective but common examples is the floating quote in which the student as writer never exists: “’A democratic and inclusive sexuality education balances risk and resiliency and recognizes that they are on a continuum and are influenced by social and cultural factors in the environment’ (Elia & Eliason, p. 25).”

Scholars, when writing in forms and purposes other than textual analysis, tend to quote rarely or not at all; when quoting in scholarly writing that isn’t textual analysis, the guideline is something like quote when the “how” of the passage is as powerful as the “what.”

We may be justified in quoting James Baldwin while not so much when using information from a peer-reviewed journal articles on social mobility or racism in policing.

Mechanical essay form and thesis sentences (declarative and conclusive statements).

If you have been wondering, the 5-paragraph essay is alive and well. Students overwhelmingly believe an introduction is one paragraph that ends with a declarative thesis statement, that essay bodies have three paragraphs or sections to correlate with the three points in that thesis, and that the conclusion is one paragraph that, yes, restates the thesis.

At no point of a student’s development is a 5-paragraph essay justifiable; it is the paint-by-numbers of composition. It is not just bad writing, it is also bad thinking.

Scholars write all sorts of essay forms and construct them around much broader concepts of openings, bodies, and closing with the thesis focus often in the form of questions to be considered and not definitive assertions made at the beginning and then proven.

As with many of the examples so far, the 5-paragraph essay template is a distraction for the student-as-writer, focusing their writing on filling in the template and not addressing and developing their writing purpose for a clear audience. [As a note, I still have students occasionally label their thesis sentence in their essays.]

Essay purpose/form and audience directed at either at no audience or the teacher/professor.

Related to the 5-paragraph essay template is that students are trapped in the context of writing an essay is a form of assessment that is being assigned and graded by the teacher. As a consequence, the purpose is just doing the assignment, and the audience is either no one in particular or simply for the teacher/professor.

While the essay form for scholarly and academic writing is narrower than the entire array of what we call essays, students must be introduced to the broader essay form that involves them as writers making decisions about how to organize, to engage the readers, and to develop the purpose of the essay.

Some of the elements I introduce is the multiple-paragraph opening and closing, subheadings, the thesis as question(s), and abandoning the closing as a restating of the introduction.

Paragraphing that is very long or lacking purpose.

One thing students as writers simply cannot do is paragraphing. They have lived in a world of prescribed number-of-sentences mandates for paragraphing, and those prescriptions have been, to say the least, really bad guidelines.

Students have learned that longer is better.

While academic and scholarly writing suffer from the long-paragraph syndrome, here I do push students toward how non-academic writers use paragraphing.

Broadly speaking, readers prefer shorter paragraphs (or at least balk at long ones). And fields such as journalism use very short paragraphing.

Since a foundational part of teaching writing for me is students learning to be purposeful instead of following templates and rules, I focus on purposeful and varied paragraphing. We read and examine many effective essays that use one-sentence paragraphs and explore how paragraphing impacts the reader/audience of the text.

Word choice and tone contradicting the content and tone of the essay topic and purpose.

Students as writers are, of course, developing and expanding their vocabulary. But the diction problem that most characterizes student writing is a lack of awareness of tone—using words that have a contradictory tone to the level of seriousness of their topic.

Lots of “thing,” “good,” “bad,” and 8-color crayon box of words when they are exploring complicated and serious issues: “Sex education in the United States is all over the place, and for some students, their sex ed is almost exactly like the students in Mean Girls” or “This article was also pretty on par with the tone of the research papers” or “Because each employee’s salaries are not posted on the front desk for everyone to read, many women don’t even realize they are being gipped until someone blabs during their break at the water cooler or they hear the specifics of their associate’s raise.”

So here we are after a pretty extensive list of what student writing tends to entail. This, by the way, is no criticism of students.

Student writing is a reflection of how students have been taught, assigned, and graded. Students often learn what they are taught despite the hand wringing to the contrary.

I have two thoughts now.

First, students deserve better writing instruction and expectations throughout K-16. That instruction needs to come from teachers who are writers, not just “English teachers,” and more educators need better experiences with being writers themselves (that is the foundation of the National Writing Project).

Next, students are capable of making this transition, although the unlearning is often not fun for them or the instructor.

And thus the paradox remains: I love students but work daily to deprogram them from behaving like students.

See Also

Reading Like a Writer (Scholar): Kingsolver’s “Making Peace”