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EdSurge
Why
Students Can’t Write — And Why Tech Is Part of the Problem
By Jeffrey R. Young
Apr 2, 2019
Writing is more important than ever, but many of today’s students are
lousy at it. John Warner has some ideas about why that is, and how to
fix it.
Warner has been teaching writing at colleges for more than 20 years.
And he’s written two books on the topic, including his most recent,
called “Why They Can’t Write.”
Part of the problem, he says, is technology. In some cases the very
technologies that were intended to improve writing, like
automatic-essay grading software, have backfired by encouraging a kind
of paint-by-numbers approach to writing.
But Warner is not anti-tech. In fact, for years he edited one of the
most popular humor magazines on the Internet, McSweeney’s Internet
Tendency — a more literary version of the The Onion. And he thinks that
the writing students do for their Instagram accounts and social media
is actually great.
The problem, he says, is what kids are asked to write in schools, like
those five-paragraph essays, which emphasize following arbitrary rules
instead of finding the most effective ways to communicate their ideas.
And he has some ideas about how to make things better.
EdSurge talked with Warner recently about his sometimes surprising
ideas about the crisis in writing instruction, including why he thinks
FitBits are part of the problem.
EdSurge: I’ve certainly heard professors grumble that their students
are bad at writing. But in your latest book, “Why Can't They Write,”
you say that students are surprisingly confident about their writing
abilities, even though you see them as poor. How do you explain this
disconnect?
Warner: Students may have gotten good grades on the kinds of writing
they've been asked to do, either in school or on a standardized
assessment. They know they've performed well on what I call “in the
book writing related simulations,” which is mostly what I think they're
asked to do in school. The purpose is to sort of prove that they can
demonstrate a limited set of moves that make it look like you know how
to write.
You’re saying they’ve been trained to essentially act like a writer,
and behave how they think a writer would?
That's exactly it. In the book I say the equivalent would be if in an
acting class we taught exclusively through asking students to do
specific imitations of actors in specific roles. We’d have like De Niro
101 or Streep 413. And they wouldn't even be acting like them, they
would just be imitating a particular performance.
So to get a good grade, they’d have to nail a De Niro impression?
Yeah. It comes from this sort of highly prescriptive practice that's
privileged because they're going to be assessed on a very narrow range
of abilities. That’s why the subtitle of my book is “killing the
five-paragraph essay and other necessities.” A lot of my students
arrive having written exclusively five-paragraph essays. And they've
been told things like never use I, never write with contractions, every
sentence must be between five and seven sentences. And then another
student will argue and say, “No, no, no. It's seven to nine sentences,
that's what I was told.”
But then they get to college, in a first-year writing class like I've
spent many years teaching, and I pull the rug out from under them and
say, “Every piece of writing is a custom job. There are no rules. We
have to think through these problems.” And they feel bummed or betrayed
or frustrated that I've changed the game on them. They understood the
game and were doing well at the game, and now the game’s different.
What I'm saying is, it's not a game, it's actually something
substantive and real that we want to ask them to do.
What would you have students and teachers do before they get to you,
instead of a paint-by-numbers approach that you say the five-paragraph
represents?
A lot of that is wrapped up in my other book, “The Writers Practice.” I
think they should be building their practice. And I define that as the
skills, attitudes, knowledge and habits-of-mind of writers. We develop
those things primarily by writing—writing to audiences, writing with
purpose, writing from things we are passionate about, writing about
things we are interested but don't know a lot about, which requires
research and all of the sorts of things we want students doing. A lot
of it is based on my reflection of my experience learning to write as a
young person sort of before the era of standardized assessments and
accountability.
But unlike when we went to school, don't kids today today actually
write a lot? Even if it's just a caption on their Instagram photo,
aren't they constantly writing for an audience?
They are. They're not practicing in school but they're writing in the
world all the time. And they're doing the kinds of things that we ask
of the writers practice all the time, they're thinking about audience.
An example I use in first year writing, I'll say, “You guys will text
your parents that you're going out. You guys will text your friends
that you're going out. What is the difference between the message you
text to your parents and the message you text to your friends?” And
they understand instantly that they're tailoring a message to audience
for radically different purposes.
And it's a relatively small matter to get them to start translating
that in academic or scholarly contexts. Once you give them an audience,
often they've not been writing for an audience. They've been writing
for a teacher in the generic sense, or an assessment which really is
entirely disembodied, where they're following the moves because those
are the moves that they know the invisible assessor is going to like.
So as soon as I give them audience and purpose they're often off and
running. And it's not a difficult or painful switch at that point.
In your book you criticize many technology innovations around the
teaching of writing. Could you talk about that?
There’s Edison's quote about how the moving picture is going to replace
the classroom, or the hype around MOOCs when we still thought those
were going to be innovative… I think that is incorrect and it's
particularly incorrect for writing. Because there's no information I
can give students about writing that will help them write better. I am
of the belief that writing can't be taught, but it can be a learned
school of thought. I can create the conditions and experiences under
which writing can be engaged with, and challenges that are interesting
and get students to want to do it more. But ultimately that's going to
happen within the student.
I'm thinking about your piece on being John McPhee's student. And it's
a great example of that process. The teacher brings you into his world,
and says this is how writers act, how they behave, how they think, what
they do. And it's great to be exposed to that, but ultimately you have
to go put that into your practice. So I spent a lot of time just
setting the terms of the action: Here's what we're going to try to do,
here are the parameters under which I want us to do it, and I then
provide a soundboard and feedback.
It's easy to describe what a good piece of writing looks like, but the
process to produce that writing is incredibly complicated and hugely
variable depending on who's doing it, and why they're doing it and what
they're doing. Which I love. That's the fascinating part of the job for
me. That's why I love teaching writing. But it does not lend itself to
prescription, and it particularly is not something where the kinds of
technologies that are injecting themselves into the space are helpful.
People argue essay grading software can make things more efficient, and
help bring down the high cost of education. So what's not to like about
this idea of automated grading?
The big problem is that efficiency is not a value when it comes to
learning to write. Learning to write is a process that requires
failure, that requires trying things over again. That requires taking a
big swing and missing. And a lot of that has to happen internally to
the writer themselves. So when these algorithms intervene, they can
really only score an essay. To give it, say, a four out of five. That
feedback by itself is not helpful.
[People tout that software gives instant feedback.] Instant feedback
can be horrible for a piece of writing. It can be much much better to
let the writer sit with having written for a period of time to let that
filter through. I'm sure any writer has experienced this, where you
wrote a draft of something, you let it sit there, you went and did
something else, maybe you went to sleep or you walked the dog or you
took a shower, or you did your yoga or whatever your thing is. And you
came back to it, and you look at it again, and something that was stuck
in your craw, all the sudden you have a solution for it.
In the book you also mention that even other technologies outside of
the classroom are hurting student writing. Even Fitbits?
Fitbit's as a kind of experience of quantification and surveillance.
[It sets the expectation that we'll be monitored.] Surveillance ruins
the atmosphere for writing, and learning in general, I think. I talk
about an app called Class Dojo that I think is potentially doing great
harm to students because it's making them hyper aware of being watched
in school. And the class portals where they're getting notifications of
their grades in real time. A huge part of learning to write is failing,
is trying to do something and not succeeding at it.
How would you boil that down to a TED talk?
Well, my Ted Talk would be very short. And it would be “fund public
higher education.” [So that colleges can pay professors to grade
student writing instead of using software.]
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