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September 09, 2008, 10:08 PM ET
The Writing of the Upper Half
“But I’ve never received a B- on a paper before.”
Nearly every college teacher has heard it before, and it’s easy to chalk it up to student jockeying and grade-grubbing. But I’ve seen too many instances of genuine confusion not to assume something more in it. It may, in fact, be true, and B- strikes this or that student as an inscrutable response, especially if the paper that earned it bore the same quality that previous papers did—papers that earned B+ and higher.
It usually takes a good half-hour to explain to the student point by point why the writing is mediocre, not superior. I’ve sometimes pushed the grade down to the sentence level, saying, for instance, “See that verb there and that misplaced comma? They make the sentence a C- sentence. Change the verb to X and fix the comma and we have an A sentence.”
The revisions proceed and the writing improves quickly, a development that sets the original confusion in an important light. It indicates that too many students come to college not having been challenged in their writing. They placed in the upper tiers of their high-school class for years, and so they appeared less in need of help and improvement and criticism. They headed to the better universities and so they never thought to question their vocabulary, eloquence, style. They agonized over their SAT scores and AP accumulation, but the well-turned phrase, the mot juste, the striking aphorism, the elegant periodic sentence . . . never made it to the resume.
And the teachers, too, in writing classes ended up spending more time on the lower half, the kids who really needed immediate help. Compared to them, the sharp ones seemed to be doing just fine.
College, then, is a wake-up call in better writing. We should apply it not only in remedial writing courses, but in the regular composition courses and in freshman classes across the curriculum. All the students need the challenge. Consider the NAEP writing scores for 12th-graders. On the last assessment, we got significant improvement at the lower end, with the percentage scoring “below basic” dropping from 26 percent in 2002 to 18 percent in 2007. But we actually had a loss at the higher end, with the “advanced” group dropping from 2 percent to 1 percent. Those achieving “proficient” stayed the same.
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