The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript

Why Can't Johnny Write?

Monday, January 6, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time

Why do college students write so poorly? What can colleges do about it?

Professors at most colleges complain that students don't know how to write. And many students complain that colleges' efforts to teach writing are poorly thought out and rely on poor teachers. At a number of elite colleges in recent years, writing requirements and programs have been revamped. Some experts believe that these efforts point to solutions that other colleges could use.

» Why Johnny Can't Write, Even Though He Went to Princeton (1/3/2003)

Nancy Sommers is director of expository writing at Harvard University. She has also advised many other colleges on how to change writing programs. Ms. Sommers will respond to questions and comments on Monday, January 6, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time. Advance questions are encouraged and may be posted now.

A transcript of the chat follows.

Thomas Bartlett (Moderator):
Hello everyone and welcome to Colloquy Live, The Chronicle's real-time discussion forum. I'm Thomas Bartlett, a reporter here, and I'll be moderating today's discussion.

We're talking today about what colleges can do to help students become better writers.

It's a pleasure to have Nancy Sommers, director of expository writing at Harvard University, here to answer your questions. And there are lots of questions for her to answer so we'll do our best to get to as many of them as we can. Let's get started.

Nancy Sommers:
A writing-intensive undergraduate education offers students opportunites to explore and pay respects to the concerns that mean the most to them, a way to provide continuity between their personal and academic interests. When students speak passionately about the role of writing in their undergraduate education they show us the ways in which they have written themselves into the center of their own education. Writing, more than any other feature of the academic life, gives students something that is their own -- a written record that they can claim. Students learn through writing how to ask questions they care about, questions that compell and inhabit them, discovering what matters most to them.

Question from Russ Hunt, St. Thomas University:
If you substitute "thinking" for "writing" throughout Thomas Bartlett's article, what do you find? Does it make you think about whether "writing" is actually a separable, teachable skill?

Nancy Sommers:
Yes, writing is a concentrated form of thinking. Writing places students in the middle of their own liberal arts education--to think critically and to confront the conceptual comforts of their world, to ask and respond to questions, to confront opposing points of view, to interpret the ideas of others, and to develop ideas of their own. To learn to write well in college is not an isolated goal. To write well, as students show us through their undergraduate experiences, means to participate and engage in the world of ideas as insiders--as producers, not solely consumers of knowledge. But for students to engage the world of ideas with thoughtful responses in writing, certain conditions need to exist. Students need to write continuously and intensely throughout their four years, not just in the freshman year, or sporadically in subsequent undergraduate years. And students need to be given genuine assignments, real questions to ponder, rather than writing assignments that ask them to regurgitate lectures. Interesting assignments help students understand that writing isn't just a matter of telling others what they already know, but rather a process of thinking, learning, and finding out what they don't know.

Question from Nancy, small two-year college:
To what extent is the poor writing of college freshmen attributable to their lack of guidance in writing in high school? I realize that many schools require writing, but my students generally report that there are few standards for their performance. Thanks.

Nancy Sommers:
Let me begin by disagreeing with your premise: I wouldn't want to make the claim that students write poorly in college, nor would I want to make the claim that students receive inadequate writing instruction in high school. It's difficult to generalize about these important issues -- students arrive at college with a wide range of writing skills. It's important to recognize that college writing is asking students to do something more than they were asked in high school -- academic writing is never a student's mother tongue; it is a difficult genre to learn. The conventions of academic writing require instruction and practice. Academic wiriting requires students to question, evaluate, interpret, to look for ambiguities, and for students to trust their own minds as reliable instruments for making such judgements.

Question from James Morrison, professor emeritus, UNC-Chapel Hill:
I think that one solution to this problem is for professors in all departments to emphasize writing (and rewriting) in their classes. However, I have heard colleagues make such statements as "I don't edit students' work," or "I don't grade on English." To me, the central question is this: How do we encourage/help professors throughout the institution focus on helping students write more effectively as one of their instructional objectives?

Nancy Sommers:
The most persuasive advocates for a writing-intensive education are the undergraduates themselves. Give them the podium and let them speak directly to their professors about the ways in which they are more engaged with their courses when they are asked to write. When I ask students what it is like to be in courses where they are not asked to write, where no papers are assigned, they speak of themselves as academic tourists because they haven't been asked to think about anything in depth. In contrast, when students are asked what it is like to be in courses where writing plays a central role, they speak passionately about these courses. One student told me, "I did my best learning when writing papers; the ideas I have written about are the ideas I know best." Another student said, "Without writing you don't really belong to a course and don't make the ideas your own." Ask students about their best academic experiences in a given semester and they are likely to tell you about a paper, not a lecture, exam, class discussion, or problem set. In fact, students are very eloquent about the differences between exams and papers. Here's what one student told me when asked: "We had exams in the course, but when you have an exam, you are answering somebody else's particular questions, not your own. You have to regurgitate the information the professor gives you in response to the question he creates." Let your students loose and they will convince their professors that writing papers is the substance of learning, the heart of what they know and how they learn.

Question from C. Worth, U. of Missouri:
I'm particularly interested in how the gradual (but unmistakable) shift in students' and institutions' attitudes toward education being very ends-oriented (degree, certificate, discrete skills) plays into this whole complex. Is one of the reasons for students' dissatisfaction with writing education their inability to "peg" the writing classes they take to specific, identifiable on-the-job benefits?

Nancy Sommers:
I agree with you that many students are job-focused during their college years, and can't imagine how a history or political science paper will help them with their non-academic job. I think, though, that we need to do a better job of helping students in liberal arts institutions understand the particular vision of liberal arts education--that college is a time for students to be given the freedom to learn how to think, to question, to be questioned, and to engage with the world of ideas. A liberal arts education asks students to try on different lenses, to develop new lines of sight, and ways of approaching knowledge. To be asked to write across the disciplines is to be asked to see farther, wider, and deeper, and ultimately for students to develop their own lenses through which they see the world, and ask others to see the world with them. Such a process doesn't happen in one paper, or in one course, but rather with sustained instruction over the course of four years, and with multiple opportunities within each course to gain practice and develop expertise. Students might be dissatisfied with their writing education because the assignments don't ask them to think, or the assignments seem useless. One student described such a situation to me once by saying "the course gave me no reason to be interested in writing the papers."

Question from Elaine Richardson, Pennsylvania State University:
Recent research has shown that many writing teachers feel underprepared to teach students from non mainstream United States English backgrounds (ESL and Standard English learners). What do you think we should do to reposition and retrain the profession on this important issue?

Nancy Sommers:
This issue will become increasingly important over the coming years. We will need to allocate more resources and prepare teachers to meet the challenges of ESL students. We will need to listen and turn to those who've done research and have the expertise to help us train these students.

Comment from Robert, NE liberal arts college:
One of the problems here is that older faculty think that they teach writing merely by making red marks all over papers. They don't see writing as a linear process. One actually told me, and I quote, "You don't think I teach writing? You should see all the marks I make on their papers."

Question from C. Beth Burch, Binghamton University SUNY:
Dr. Sommers, would you please comment on the advantages and disadvantages of having writing courses housed in departments of writing that are separate from an English or Communications department? Do you believe that the departmental origin of a course typically has a significant outcome on the writing skills that students develop and the knowledge they acquire about writing? Under what conditions should universities consider creating standalone departments of writing?

Nancy Sommers:
This is a difficult question to answer in the abstract. I can imagine a university creating a free-standing department of writing if no department is capable or interested in handling the responsibility of teaching writing. For instance, even though English departments traditionally house freshman writing programs, they often teach writing rather reluctantly, almost as if it is a burden, rather than as their central mission. I can easily imagine a university where an English dept. isn't the best place for a writing program, and instead the university locates it in a history or anthropology department because one of these departments decides they have the training, expertise, and passion for such work. On the other hand, I could imagine a university creating a free-standing department of writing if the university decides that they don't want a discipline-specific form of writing taught to freshmen, but rather want students to be able to choose from a range of interdisciplinary courses taught by instructors from many different disciplines. The program I direct is free-standing, which gives us the opportunity to hire faculty from the humanities, social sciences, or sciences, including instructors with law or business school degrees. It also gives us the opportunity to teach what we think of as the common ground of academic writing-- academic argument. Our goal is to teach students how to test propositions, frame questions, summarize another writer's argument, but not succumb to the writer's conclusions, and to offer students specific strategies for pondering and examining language, both the arguments they read, and the arguments they compose.

Comment from Jan Inman, Wichita Falls High School, WF, TX:
I do not have a question but would like to make a comment. One reason college students can't write is because they do not have the proper background and experience in high school. Why don't high school teachers teach students how to write? Most have unmanageable class loads; I have 170 students in junior English. We cannot effectively teach and give feedback to this many students.

Question from doris davenport, Stillman College, small 4 year college:
I am pleased about this Colloquy Live topic. My question is . . . why won't (or can't) college students read? Writing skills are linked to reading skills; our comp. students won't even read the textbooks. Thanks.

Nancy Sommers:
Yes, writing skills are linked to reading skills. See what happens when you give your students something well-written to read instead of textbooks, a primary text instead of a secondary text. Give them engaging arguments; give them memorable prose; hook them to texts that ask for written responses. Textbooks often seem to students as if they are written by distant and ancient voices. See what happens when students are engaged with the topic and feel as if they have something to contribute to the discussion.

Comment from George Krull, Grant Thornton LLP:
This is more of a statement than a question. Recently educated university graduates and current students cannot write because they either do not read or they cannot read. Generally, they do not take the time to even proof their writing for grammer [sic] and spelling errors.

A possible cause is technology. Technology is a double-edged sword. It provides rapid access to information, but it has impacted negatively our abilities to communicate orally and in writing.

Colleges should not accept poor writing, even if the colleges only focus on their students' abilities to spell and create sentences with nouns, verbs and objects. Ultimately, their poor writing skills will impact their professional growth and responsibilities.

Question from Audrey J. Kemp, Worcester State College:
In your opinion and based on your own experiences, how do elite universities like Harvard compare to public- or state-funded institutions of higher education in terms of their writing programs, and the students that they produce in terms of writing ability?

Nancy Sommers:
In my experience, some of the most dedicated writing teachers teach in community colleges and public- or state-funded institutions. Public institutions have a tradition of thinking about their writing program and taking the training of writing teachers much more seriously than elite institutions have in the past. Elite institutions have a lot to learn from the important work that goes on at community colleges and state-funded colleges.

Question from Jim Seitz, University of Pittsburgh:
The Ivy League solution discussed in the Chronicle article (wherein full-time lecturers, rather than graduate students, teach writing) does not address the problems that this approach creates, such as a two-tiered faculty (with writing still taught by the "lower" group) who are often considered disposable by the upper administration. (Princeton kicks out these instructors after five years or less; Duke after three.) I don't doubt that non-tenure-track faculty can be effective teachers, but I wonder whether you find this approach a satisfactory way for universities to confront the labor issues raised by the teaching of writing.

Nancy Sommers:
No, I don't find it a satisfactory solution. In a more ideal world, my own program would have a faculty of tenured writing teachers. On the other hand, we are able to hire talented Ph.D.s with academic training in a variety of disciplines, who see our teaching opportunities as post-docs and use their teaching experiences to become better teachers. They leave our programs and go off and teach at colleges throughout the United States in history, philosophy, anthropology departments -- the departments in which they've been trained. And they bring to that teaching, and to their students, a pedagogy that has been influenced by their years of teaching writing.

Question from Lewis Pyenson, U of Louisiana at Lafayette:
Is it not that students ape their masters? How can we expect reason, clarity, and elegance from them when professors and especially administrators are animated by postmodernist whimsy, obscurity, and kitsch?

Nancy Sommers:
Yes, the discomfort and uncertainity freshman experience with academic writing is often a healthy response to akwardness they feel learning a new language with unfamiliar (and often unattractive) customs and conventions. And it is a healthy response to being asked to write in a genre that is often viewed so pejoratively that contests exist each year to give prizes to the most obscure, turgid, pretentiously opaque writing. On the other hand, there is also wonderfully clear, memorable, and pursuasively forceful academic writing, which is what we need to offer our students as we teach them to write.

Comment from Doug Downs, University of Utah:
A comment on a comment: George Krull's recent comment suggests a very narrow definition of "writing problems." What do we do about students who can write "perfectly" and yet are saying mindless things? Is a comma out of place the only thing that leads to "poor" writing? Is a mispelling [sic] the worst thing to find in a piece of writing? If not, why the total focus on it?

Question from Mika Troutman, University of Maryland:
Please comment on the content of writing courses: should freshman writing courses focus on how to write rather than analyzing and discussing required reading? And if this is the case, do writing instructors and students find classes on active voice versus passive voice, for instance, tedious and boring?

Nancy Sommers:
It's impossible to separate the teaching of reading from the teaching of writing. In my experience, students thrive in writing courses where there is an intellectual occasion for them to engage subjects in a sustained way -- a set of defined issues, debates, and dilemas -- while at the same time, learning the conventions of academic arguments and developing the writerly habits to use these conventions in their own efface.

Question from Rosalie Franks, Roger Williams University, Bristol, RI:
What do you think are the two or three significant writing skills students lack when they first enter college? How can these deficiencies be addressed immediately?

Nancy Sommers:
College writing requires more pages, more time, and more substance. Students are expected to work closely with one text, interpret its layers and levels, and to figure out to what depth they can go. The most important skill I want to teach my students is how to be close readers -- to learn how to discover the complexities and ambiguities of text.

Question from Vince, Gen Ed Dept. Chair, Everest College, Phoenix, AZ:
What literature, i.e. books,texts, journals, articles, is there available relating to successful,new techniques in teaching writing and composition?

Nancy Sommers:
I would direct your attention to the publications of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), including its journals, "College Composition and Communication" and "College English." I would also direct your attention to the Conference on College Compostion and Communication (CCCC), where significant research and important papers are delivered. The conference will be held this year in March in New York City.

Question from Douglas D. Hesse, Illinois State University:
Nancy, as you know, over the past 40 years there has been a tremendous amount of research, theory-building, and innovation in the pedagogy of writing. And yet, the wealth of scholarship and practice vested in organizations like the 10,000 member Conference on College Composition and Communication doesn't seem to have received much attention at more prestigious schools until recently. Why might that be? And what from those decades of scholarship and pedagogical practice do you think faculty at elite schools would most benefit from knowing? Thanks, Doug.

Nancy Sommers:
I feel uncomfortable speaking in broad terms about elite schools; I can only speak about my own institution. My own program has a lot to learn from the important scholarship and practice in the field. To that end, we try to send as many faculty members as financially possible to the CCCC. It's also important to make a distinction when talking about the teaching of writing between what goes on in the freshman writing program versus what goes on in upper level courses and majors. Elite universities have placed more attention upon teaching writing within majors and offering students writing-intensive education than they have looking at the important first year writing experience.

Question from Karl Schnapp, Bristol Community College:
I understand the "utility" of asking students to compose narrative essays early in their writing course, but I've never been convinced that the skills they learn by writing narrative essays apply (or translate) to the kinds of writing that will be required later in college and career (primarily expository, argumentative, and persuasive). What do YOU think?

Nancy Sommers:
Narrative is an important expository skill to teach freshman, but not the only skill. A comprehensive freshman writing program anticipates the kind of writing challenges that students will encounter during their undergraduate years, especially academic argument. It is not the function of a freshman writing program to teach students everything they need to know about writing. Rather, the teaching of writing is the shared responsibilty of every faculty member at a university.

Question from Doug Hesse, Illinois State University:
One of the problems cited in the Chronicle article was poorly trained or univested writing teachers. Several writing programs, however, have invested much time and energy into preparing and supporting writing teachers. Would you comment on some of the qualities that you see important in the preparation and development of writing teachers?

Nancy Sommers:
To be passionate about the teaching of writing, one needs to love language and think of one's self as a writer. So, a key element in the preparation of teachers should be lots of writing ,and new teachers should be asked to do the kind of writing they will be asking their students to do. In addition, they need to learn how to give thoughtful and honest feedback so that they can teach their own students that writing isn't just a matter of telling others what they already know, but rather a process of finding out what they don't know. I would also want new teachers to be steeped in the history and tradition of composition research and scholarship so that they understand what a rich and rewarding career they are beginning.

Question from Aina Schneller of Auburn University:
How do you feel about the five paragraph essay as a vehicle of instruction on the college level? Most students come prepared with some knowledge of it.

Nancy Sommers:
Almost all the freshman I've taught have also been taught the standard high-school model of the five paragraph essay, and I'm always grateful to the high school teachers who have taught my students these lessons. The five paragraph essay gives students a structure in the practice of writing. However, the high school model begins to show its limitations-- the ways in which its form determines the content--when students are asked to write academic arguments and perform conceptual moves that are not comfortably contained in the five paragraph essay. When students are asked to find problems or puzzles in the evidence of text, to defend one interpretation over another, or to discover complication and implication in the argument they read and those they write, they begin to understand for themselves the limitations of the five paragraph essay.

Comment from Paul, NCTE:
I would add to Nancy's list of NCTE journals "Teaching English in the Two-Year College," an NCTE journal that focuses on the classroom work of teaching writing and literature at the lower-division level.

Comment from Vicky, small private university:
Could the Internet have a part in why students write poorly? Plagiarism is certainly rampant, and the sites with papers available to students is continuing to grow. As a staff and freelance journalist, I taught my community college and university freshman English courses from a journalistic standpoint. Students were required to interview, organize their notes and write about topics at our university and city as well as write in a lean, concise manner. This certainly engaged them in real world topics, issues and problems that affected them. If students are expected to act like journalists who must do their own digging, I believe they will rely on their research and writing abilities instead of papers they might lift from the Internet. I now teach journalism exclusively but would still structure my English classes the same way.

Question from Pamela den Ouden, Northern Lights College, BC, Canada:
Many first-year composition courses focus on journalistic-style writing comprised of personal essays that compare and contrast, describe a process, tell a narrative, etc. The finished products (essays), however, bear little or no resemblance to the 10-12 page research papers students are required to write for other college and university courses. How can we best help first-year college students acquire the skills necessary to do the kind of writing they will be required to do as they progress through college and university?

Nancy Sommers:
Starting in 1993, I began asking similar questions and started to survey students and faculty for their assesment of our writing program. In addition, we collected writing assignments from a wide range of disciplines to uncover patterns of assignment types and conventions. Studying one's own writing program is a sobering experience. We learned from our 1993 research that students often felt as if their writing course was an isolated academic experience. Not only did the assignments in our writing program not seem like anything they would write again, but the collection of writing assignments validated their observations. In response to this research, we revised our writing program.

Thomas Bartlett (Moderator):
Thanks to Nancy and thanks to all of you for your questions.

Nancy Sommers:
Too often in our discussions about the teaching of writing, we neglect to imagine what it feels like to be a student who is asked to practice the new conventions and expectations of college writing as they learn. Students are pushed to write as experts, as if they are fully familiar with the materials and methods of the disciplines in which they write, even while fully aware of their status as novices, and the ventriloquism act they need to write as experts. Students are asked to become master builders and to develop expertise and authority even as they learn how to hold the tools and decifer their users' manuals. Students need instruction throughout all four years of undergraduate education; they need to write continuously and intensely throughout all four years, not just in the freshman year. Teaching of writing is all-consuming and challenging work; I hope this online discussion can help bring more attention and respect for the vital work of writing programs and writing teachers.