Why Undergrads Aren’t Writing Enough

I think that a student who is asked to write a 25-page paper is right to feel that it is unjust; the undergrad cannot ever imagine having to write a document that substantial in their future career (which will probably not require writing more than a 2 or 3 page brief, email, summary, or report), unless they are going on to graduate school in the humanities. The skills that the 25-page paper require (critical reading skills, pulling from various sources and synthesizing the info, etc) are skills that are needed, but does it have to be encouraged and evaluated in a 25 page paper? I have read elsewhere that when looking at how much writing a student does, does it take into consideration all of the various forms of writing a student does during a semester-long course?

I am sympathetic. I teach Freshmen writing, and I encounter professors all of the time who complain that the students can’t write in their 400-level classes. And I also face ever-increasing caps on my writing class while being simultaneously being told that it doesn’t make a difference in student learning outcomes. Right. But I think shorter writing assignments can be valuable learning tools, even at the 400 level. Is the vocabulary and analysis at the 400-level? So while I agree “students can’t write” I don’t necessarily agree that more 25 page papers is the answer.

I should have made clear, sherbygirl, that “25 pages minimum” did not mean one paper that long. It meant 25 total pages, which could be five 5-page papers. Still, I agree with Bill that longer papers are necessary, if only to force students to compose longer arguments, do deeper research, and focus on one thesis/topic for several days in a row. And I think, too, that the assumption that we shouldn’t have students do anything that they won’t need to do later on is a faulty one. Good training often requires exercises that one will not repeat later on.

This is where I chime in with the usual and expected hyper-capitalism perspective.

First, we live in a society where concision (media) is rewarded and advertisement is privileged. Wading through reams of material to get the surprise at the end is often seen by these systems as a loss of something (market share, timesuck, opportunity cost). Also, technology is used to exploit concision by bombarding consumers with targeted and repetitive messages effectively and quickly. When you think about the process of a 25 page paper, this is the exact opposite message. A 25 page paper is like academic Ritalin that no one wants to take….

Second, I do not believe very many milieus have been effective at capturing how a college writing translates into the working world beyond (profit, credentialing and job training) for most people.

What this means for those who value the education process is something very different than the utilitarian student who just wants to get through this stage of life and move on. In corporate university inc, there is very little life preparation going on here beyond sending messages of what it takes to get a job, the risks and benefits of a future job and where you should be based on past standards. It is no wonder that many young students find writing troublesome, we do not value it as an investment (in-the-time-is-money-world, anything requiring complex thought that isn’t directly related to making a profit is discouraged)….

Lastly, I am with Bill on this. For me, its not so much about the number of pages or the number of times a students tackles a long subject. Instead, I would like to consistently see a paper with these elements:

1) Well thought out and succinct Thesis Statement
2) Visible writing style, simple using a few meaningful words
3) Demonstration of knowledge (who & what has been written)
4) Summary Paragraph of the Literature
5) Central points, implications, future areas of research
6) Personal reflection segment
7) Concluding Paragraph (tying in themes)
8) References
9) Good grammar

If a student can pull this off once in a paper over 25 pages and keep this as a reference, then I am satisfied over a semester. Now, over a career, we all know that repetition of a task makes improvement likely… That’s what is so disturbing that fewer students find themselves repeating this process that we know works.

Nice article Mark!

My undergrad required Junior (one semester) and Senior (two semesters) Independent Study. My senior paper was over 100 pages. Of course that was the 80′s…

I’m a research scientist, and I write all the time. Grant applications, journal articles, reviews of other people’s grant applications and journal articles, course descriptions…….

I was repeatedly told by residents and attendings during med school that my notes in patient charts were remarkably clear and well-written, and admit to my own surprise at the poor grammar, spelling, and content of the notes of some of my colleagues who had attended elite undergraduate institutions instead of hohum-ranked public ones like mine.

What I’m getting at in this end-of-the-work-day comment is that learning to write well is worth it no matter what format – short or long, outlined patient note or lengthy argument – you will be using in your job or career after college. Learning ONLY to write brief-format business reports is most likely a disservice to those business majors. I did a fair amount of writing in my college courses before my state (at least for a time) instituted minimum page requirements for core courses, though most of what I learned about writing I learned through voracious reading and then the discipline of three years of AP literature classes in high school.

I was confused for a moment about the 25 page paper issue too, but, since I think my point holds anyway, I’ll go ahead. In my philosophy classes I always give writing assignments. In lower-level courses it is usually a few 4-5 page papers with an exam. I’ve found that anything longer than that is really unnecessary and encourages irrelevant padding in the paper. In my upper level classes, I usually assign several 6-7 page papers with an exam. When I was an undergraduate, I particularly remember taking an advanced course on Kant. The most difficult part was that we had to write five 4-page papers, with a strict page limit (nothing over 4 pages). This was very useful as it forced you to focus on what was essential to your point and nothing else. So, in my view, unless one is doing a long topic specifically, I don’t think longer papers are necessary. What matters is whether the student can make his or her point in the space allotted. Having lots to say about a subject is one skill to develop among writers; learning how to focus on what’s essential is another. What is needed is really for students to practice writing frequently and less how many pages to write.

I wonder if we give students enough reason to write more than is required? In some classes, I begin with strict limits on length: no more than a page, two pages, and so on, along with clear objectives. Students learn how writing concisely is difficult in many situations.

Couldn’t we turn things around so that students learn that short may be more difficult than long? And then they may ask if they can go beyond the stated length?

It’s a great feeling when students really need to write more and practically beg for the opportunity–they are invested in the topic which now seems vital to them.

I think “walsh05″ hits the nail best…all students, regardless of degree area, just need to be writing more frequently, whether it is 2 or 10 page papers. I also like the concept of focused papers, as these are quite useful, in any field. Most of those I wrote while in industry were under 4 pages, but I also had one every quarter, somewhere between 9-20 pages. Being comfortable as a writer is paramount.

Good question, philosophy. As we know, enrollments in remedial writing courses continue to climb, and the success of those courses remains suspect. So do complaints from employers about writing skills. I imagine that the levels of writing talent roughly approximate the levels of general academic talent as you move from “open” schools to competitive schools. I would say, however, that the writing skills of students I’ve encountered over the years at the latter institutions have deteriorated in certain ways in the last decade or so (generalizing from my very small sample).

Writing is really a high-level and advanced skill. It seems like journalism departments may know how to teach it, and they teach it by making “writing” the content of the courses as well as the requirement. It seems to me that developing such an advanced skill as writing require a lot of practice, and feedback, more practice, more feedback…really over a course of years. Most courses feature content as what the student is supposed to learn, and writing is usually just a mechanism for assessing the student’s grasp or mastery of the content. In other word, students are generally learning content, now how to write. Maybe writing in..[your major] should actually be a required series of courses in an academic major, so the student’s writing skills are really developed, honed, and fostered over time. I agree with those who think student writing should be more frequent, but it should also be part of what the student is studying, so some of the teaching effort should be aimed directly a fostering writing skills apart from content…that’s what it takes to really develop writing skills in my opinion.

Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net
Twitter.com/arrive2_net

The best writing assignment I ever had was a two part assignment (though at the start none of the students knew it was a two part assignment). We were told to write a paper on a topic of our choosing and had to write a minimum of 20 pages for it (no maximum). We turned in the assignment and 2 weeks later (it was a relatively small upper level course) we were handed back our papers with comments and told our next paper assignment was to take that paper and revise it. This time, however, there was a 12 page limit, and the final product would constitute over half of our grade. This had several advantages in that it forced us to be incredibly thorough and develop a line of argument, and yet also forced us to be concise. The comments on our papers often indicated where more research was needed so that the final products, despite being shorter, were actually better researched. Additionally, because of the way the assignment worked, it would make it incredibly difficult to plagiarize or use a “custom essay” site (though, of course, not impossible). That paper was the best paper of my undergraduate ‘career.’

I teach writing, research, and analytical skills to first-year students at a mid-rank law school. All of my students have completed an undergraduate degree, and all did better in college than the average student. Despite this, I’m astonished anew each year by the range of problems I see. Forget 20-page papers — many students can’t write a cohesive paragraph with a clear thesis sentence, and mechanical problems are widespread (including misuse of apostrophes, hyphens, and commas).

If students can’t write, it’s because no one is teaching them to write, and it starts in high school. In one of the best local districts here, the only high school English teacher with a degree in English has just retired. The rest are education majors who switched careers after working at things like banking. Most are good teachers in a broad sense, but they lack the background, skills, and passion to teach writing well.

There’s a place for longer papers, but students don’t learn to write by writing a 20-page paper. They learn through frequent shorter assignments with multiple drafts and frequent, intensive feedback. I have 35 students for a year-long course, and they submit a total of roughly 60 pages each (not including drafts), with only the last assignment (a 20-page brief) being more than 10 pages. It isn’t reasonably possible for any instructor to grade more than that and do it well. If I gave them longer assignments, the quality of the feedback would suffer and they would learn less.

As a supplement to the issues that other mention above, I’ll offer one additional note. When college professors assign longer papers (in a seminar or otherwise), they expect their students to write as they do. But the style of writing that “works” in an academic environment isn’t effective in a legal memo, or in any other document that people typically write outside the “academy.” Thus, I’m fighting two battles at once. Not only must I teach my students the things that they didn’t learn in high school English or freshman composition, but I must also help them forget the bad habits some of their professors taught them.

All that said, I love my job. Most of my students are eager to learn, and they’re grateful that someone is finally helping them learn to do it right.

To focus on the number of pages is absurd. For some reason we think a twenty five page paper produces strong writing and thinking skills. It does not and it often results in a lot of plagiarism and fluff.

Communication in the 21st century requires a different approach. There more must be more emphasis on the mechanics of writing (learn how to diagram a sentence)and sentence structure. Teach students to be concise and clear. That will serve them best in their personal and professional life.

I have colleagues in business who require long papers and scribble feedback all over the long papers. Many of the marks are about what the instructors call “writing stuff.” A major problem with this is that the sense of writing stuff includes erroneous absolutes, such as “an apostrophe is always needed when a word owns another word,” to which I tell them, that rule is entirely yours, but not your’s (but they don’t hear either the properly absent apostrophe or the apostrophe acting as an expletive). And when I mention idiomatic appropriateness, convention, tradition or personal (or corporate) preference, even with such a little thing as the apostrophe, the inability to hear what I say and what I don’t say is even greater than it is to hear the absent or expletive apostrophes of “yours/your’s.” I don’t even try to discuss the difference between relying more heavily on grammar than on syntax, for the construction of coherent sentences. The trouble, as I suspect that you may have some feeling for yourself, Mr. Bauelein, is that men such as the Mr. Hamilton of your little story and the instructors of my little story universalize their impressions of language and correctness and beauty and aptness, and these impressions are rarely very elaborate and informed and humane and beautiful.

Let’s shift the focus for a moment to programs rather than courses. It may not be important to have a 25-page paper in any one course, but if a program (say, the history major, anthropology, business administration, etc.) does not systematically teach students to write at different lengths with different purposes, then it is shortchanging them.

My daughter, lawyering for nonprofits these days, says that the most valuable long-term gain from high school and college was learning how to produce different genres of writing for different purposes. She can bullet-point with the best of them, but she also writes 60-page law review articles in many, many stages. As she has often commented, you can’t bullet-point well in an advocacy piece if you don’t know what goes into the 15-page policy statement and the 50-page problem analysis that back it up.

In my college’s philosophy program we introduced decades ago two writing seminars, one for juniors, one for seniors. They are far harder to teach than lecture courses or graduate seminars–especially in the junior seminar you can take nothing for granted.

So, for instance, starting with short, well-defined prompts, we guide second-semester juniors through primary literature by a great thinker and select excellent secondary sources. Our goal is to get them to emulate the latter in a 25-page paper. It is a bit like junior scholar’s bootcamp. At the beginning of the semester most doubt they can do it; by the end, they all have written something purposeful and usually good, and they marvel at how far they have come. So do I….

Writing multiple drafts means that virtually none of those students produce “padding.” A long paper is an achievement of a qualitatively higher type than the two-page concise response to a narrowly focused prompt that comes at the beginning of the semester!

I agree with many of these points. Learning to write artfully requires a certain level of maturity and time. I teach in the Humanities at a community college. Many of my students begin classes with only basic skills, particularly returning adults. They simply panic at the thought of anything more than a page. I require a 3-5 page paper and a visual presentation (power point). However, I also spend time helping students to choose a topic that is right for them, in addition to providing support materials such as an APA/MLA guide, sample thesis sentences, and a mandatory library session taught by one of our librarians. It definately eases their anxiety. The fact is, we can’t assume that these students know what to do. I came to college well-prepared. But, that was way before the testing generation. Frankly, it’s up to faculty to pull them through at times, thus filling the gaps in their education.

The complaint that undergrads can’t write is like the corrupt youth cry that is as old as Socrates.

The kids are alright; despite our inept attempts to teach them slash screw them up.

Disclaimer: This comment is written from the vantage point of a student. I only know what worked for me.

I thank my lucky stars for a (HS) junior fast-track English teacher who made us write 70% of the days we were in class. The first day of class, we were told to create an outline and write 3 pages based on that outline. We did this 4 times a week for a month, then twice a week for the rest of the year. We also did a research paper on a literary work. Sometimes we were given great leeway on subject matter; sometimes we were told exactly what the subject should be. I can’t imagine how much time that teacher must have spent per week on prep and grading.

We all started out making C’s to F’s, but by the end of the year, we were well-equipped not just for college, but for the world.

The process of communicating in written form must become a habit; after that, the size or form the writing takes is absorbed quickly. One does not have to write a lot of 25-page papers; one must be able to organize one’s thoughts and state them succinctly, no matter how narrow or far-ranging the subject matter. The teacher’s challenge is how to ingrain that habit when 1) your students are challenged by so many disparate requirements that don’t, on the surface, have anything to do with each other; and 2) the disciplines creating those requirements do not communicate.

I have my students write up to a page at least once a week, sometimes twice, in response to the reading. The rules are simple: respond, keep it to one side of the page, a paragraph minimum. I read them quickly, and grade them in portfolio periodically. I find that students begin to write fluidly and extensively, and usually better than on formal papers. They may use these papers as a savings bank on which to draw for formal periodic papers, which I keep short (2-3 pages). They also have a research project, 15 pages plus poster plus presentation. (rough drafts are read) My goal is to make them feel good and empowered about the writing process. Its a lot of work, but I read stuff that is worth reading and that puts me into conversation (on paper) with each student.

This is an interesting thread, and hats off to Mark Bauerlein for starting it. Two thoughts:

1. No one has mentioned Blackboard and other online programs for having students post their writing. I found it very useful to have weekly assignments such as written responses to prompt questions that covered the reading in advance of class discussion, or responses to film viewing the students did outside of class before we met. Not only did this give them writing experience, it was writing that was read by all the other students, so there was actually a certain implicit standard–your writing would be seen and judged by other class members. And it gives the writer a better sense of writing for an audience or readership (something journalists learn right away, to their great benefit). And, it lead to vastly better class discussions.

2. I think there’s a difference between the 10 week quarter system and the 15 week semester system for writing. As an undergrad on semesters, we never even thought about our final paper until the 10th or 12th week of the semester, and we knew a lot of the terrain by then. Teaching on the quarter system, I discovered students had to have a topic in hand by the third week (so they could start library research, recall books, etc.), an outline by the 5th, and a first draft by the 7th so I could critique the first draft for them to rewrite for their final paper. This is really hard for graduate student level work where you expect extensive research.

Chuck Kleinhans

@kathden,

Interesting. One of my doctorates is in the philosophy of science and I hawked my 10-speed to get myself to Bertrand Russell’s last guest lectures in the U.S. In spite of spending many years on these topics — Frege through both Wittgenstein’s and forward — I can’t see the link that is so clear to you. I would recommend that you contemplate the fact that every fully satisfying description of a system entails a meta-description which, by definition, is not contained by it. While deeply interesting to odd folks like me, these matters do not vitiate the practical concerns I expressed above. Applied evaluation sciences need not and should not be troubled by the fact that there is always a meta-perspective. The generalization of your principle, assuming I repaired it, would halt many forms of rational progress.

I’m tempted to unpack this for you but I sense that you would not appreciate it. For now, let’s leave my position as follows:

Getting clear about what you want a student to learn and measuring whether or not they learned it accordance with the precepts of reasonably modern measurement sciences is not, as you say, “. . . performing a highly speculative nationwide experiment without realizing what we are doing.” This is pure anti-scientific, atavistic bunk. Of course, I may not be appreciating that you have gone beyond this perspective. If so, please tell us: are you a criterion or norm-referenced fellow and, within either of those perspectives, how do you know what it is that you are teaching and that it has been learned at a specified level?

“…25 pages of finished out-of-class writing…” How do you get “one paper 25 pages long” out of this? I understood exactly what Mark meant. He meant “25 pages of finished out-of-class writing.” How much clearer could it be?

Mark,

QUOTE: “In literary studies, short assignments by themselves do not capture the content of the subjects we wish to impart. And you can’t get around this by breaking up the 15 pages into smaller pieces. The argument should be continuous. Some arguments do take 15+ pages to be developed.”

Agreed. But should your specifications be in terms of concepts addressed, problems resolved, analyses unpacked, etc. OR in terms of number of pages. The latter makes no sense to me and we both know that an occasional student is able to do in three pages what even we could not do in 10. Why not specify content to be addressed and let the page count take care of itself? The common answer is that the student will not dig deeply enough. Empirically true but the failure lies in our specification and we also know that even a page count will not lead to depth.

If I remember correctly, punctuation and grammar are taught in third grade, not high school. In high school, students should be learning how to do research, organizing their findings and writing a cohesive report on them. If a creative writing or journalism course, then the purpose is different. In some courses, devising a persuasive argument is the goal. My children’s school district used what they call, “Writing Across the Curriculum.” Students had to learn how to write different types of compositions depending on the class, but they had to write in most classes (with exceptions such as math.) I have a son about to graduate with honors as an English major (and an outstanding, prolific creative writer) but my more “blue-collar” son who excelled in automotive technology also learned how to write decently. I can’t believe we’re talking about college freshmen writing with mechanical errors.

Those arguing against rubrics seem to fall into the well-worn rut of black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking. I haven’t read any comment that says rubrics are the be-all, end-all of grading. They are guides that remind us of what is important and not important, helping us grade and comment fairly and consistently. They are not, or should not be, rigid yes/no absolutes.

From a student perspective, give me a rubric anytime so I know what the instructor wants from me. I can live with shades of gray. I can’t live with guessing games.

@juris_prudence & klwilcoxon – I think we are all in agreement. I’m not suggesting anything universal or boilerplate. One is best when creative. That said, there are tools that need to be learned if we are going to work in this business. Too many among us are unprofessional in our grading; we ridicule and reject measurement science when all we are really conveying is that we proudly ignorant of important professional tools.

I would wager, duchess, that your story rings true with thousands of instructors across the country.

Writing reflects thinking. The problem is cognitive.

MIT had this idea of distributed local neighborhood Make It Labs for ordinary nerds—sets of tools and technology gizmos for people to invent their own devices and systems with.  

Microsoft by unbundling its controller and providing development tools, is doing something quite similar.  

Silicon Valley beat MIT and Route 128 in part by 70% of its ventures being less than 10 employees, that is, specialty shops that outsourced 90% of all they did, reconfiguring in an instant to redirect toward new trend directions—while DEC and the big ponderous monkey hierarchies MIT preferred turned too slowly to survive new trends—agent populations in temporary coalitions defeating fat tall monkey farms wearing suits and playing I am more important in rank than you games all day long.   

So we can see the MIT labs and Microsoft unbundling here as extending Silicon Valley style to the entire US population—crowdsourcing without the web—social crowdsourcing (Note I am not entirely stupid and deliberately included a contradiction about MIT’s worth and role in the above).  

As California self destructs as a state, in large part by an influx of Easterners with their monkey hierarchy kiss up culture of rank games and big-ness worship—-Silicon Valley will have to socially crowd-source innovation because California is filled with ugly people with anti-innovation fat big slow impressive hierarchy worshipers.  As California eliminates education at all levels, Silicon Valley will have to get capable people via social and web crowdsourcing BUT web crowdsourcing is not hefty enough to work, social crowdsourcing is more realistic as a survival web for Silicon Valley embedded in a puss filled corpse called California—just handling the smell of death there every day is a challenge to many these days.  Note the horror on professor faces when they realize that 1/2 of ALL their funding —salary, pensions, parking, travel, conferences, research—-ALREADY DIED.  

If I were China I would buy all the good parts of California and leave behind the junk for bigots of the American right and left to bicker over while dying.

I am an ape