Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion NYT piece on test standards for writing

I agree that is a big part of the problem. Too many (non-elite?) colleges are run more like businesses these days and seem to only care about getting the admission monies, whether the student is prepared or not.

I think part of the problem is also the incessant calls for everyone to go to college, when it is quite clear that some people should not- even some very bright people are not meant for college. The US could really use a good technical and vocational model for those kids.

We started doing serious work on parts of speech and other aspects of grammar when I was in fifth grade. We also learned how to write topic sentences, etc. This work continued all the way through high school, and we had to start writing short papers in junior high. My Honors English class had to write a serious term paper (20 page minimum) in 10th grade. My high school offered an advanced composition course for 12th graders.

My college required that every student take a semester-long Freshman writing seminar class. If you didn't take one, you didn't graduate, and taking the class after your freshman year was, shall we say, not recommended.

We had to write a short paper every week. The professor shredded our papers, and then we had to rewrite them and hand them back in by the end of the week. That class was very demanding. I just looked online; they still offer 13 sections of that course at my small alma mater.

I took two more English classes after that, and my first year of classes prepared me to write over 100 pages in my sophomore year (not counting lab reports). I got all As that year. If my freshmen professors hadn't been so tough, I wouldn't have done so well.

I looked at course catalogs for a couple of local colleges, and their catalogs list courses in expository writing, and the California universities seem to require a course in composition to graduate. So if all these places are requiring these courses, why aren't students learning how to write? Are the courses less demanding? Do the profs not tear the papers apart? Does anyone know?

Part of it depends on how much you enjoy writing. I personally don't like it at all, so I avoid it whenever possible.

My writing probably peaked in late high school/early college when I had to do a lot of writing. I did well in freshman English and then proceeded to avoid anything to do with writing. By the time I was done with college, it was pretty poor. I nearly failed legal writing in law school, partially because I was so rusty and partially because I really dislike writing.

I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting the rules of grammar over time, being that I have no real interest in retaining that knowledge. It's just one of those areas of life I find incredibly boring.

From my experience as a returning student (I have taken art/English classes at a CA community college years after getting my "real" engineering degree a long time ago in a country far, far away) and seen other students who couldn't string a coherent, properly spelled sentence together, there are three things at play:

1) community colleges have to take anybody who graduates from high school. Not just people who graduate from high school after taking all honor/AP classes. Clearly it is possible to graduate without having mastered the basics (which what you got in honors classes... probably weren't). Also lots of returning students who might have forgotten a lot.

2) lots of foreign students struggling with the language and the conventions of US essay writing. In most community colleges their full tuition keeps the boat afloat, so... (there was an article recently in IIRC the NYT about a cottage industry of faked admission files for Chinese students, which probably doesn't help).

3) And while intro to English composition is indeed required for graduation, it teaches the basics and no, shredding is frowned upon. The buzz word is constructive criticism . There are remedial classes you have to take before taking English composition (or the ESL equivalent) and up front testing, but while most writing heavy classes (say, history vs. color theory) recommend waiting until you have passed English composition a lot of students ignore the warnings.

It's been our experience that grammar, parts of speech, sentence construction and the like are simply skimmed over, if taught at all. DD16 had serious gaps in this area because she had not been taught.

Benchmarks begin in 4th grade, are (allegedly) reexamined again in 7th, and by 8th one is supposed to have a handle on this material. But it's not happening. You cannot believe the level of some of the senior essays I have read, from A students. It's frightening.

Totally agree. DD8 sometimes gets spelling errors corrected on her writing assignments, but rarely anything beyond that. She's a generally good writer (because she reads voraciously), but would benefit more from detailed feedback than from being passed on through with errors intact.

She did a Michael Clay Thompson grammar class through GLL last summer, and learned more grammar from that than from an entire year of school.