Professors express concern about student writing ability
By Katie Schleiss
Some students come to the University of Portland with excellent writing skills, wowing professors with eloquent prose and graceful handling of complex grammatical structures. Other students, however, struggle to write well and need extra guidance from professors.
All students are required to take three writing intensive classes, with the intention of making students better writers and more efficient at researching.
Many professors, however, have expressed concern that some students do not come to this university adequately prepared to tackle this challenge.
Here at UP, there are certain requirements to help students rise to the challenge of college writing. These classes include Biblical Traditions, Introduction to Literature and Introduction to Philosophy.
Senior Kaycie Rueter has been a writing intensive tutor, or WIT, for about six months and has also worked at the Writing Center as a writing assistant for the philosophy department for the past three years.
She said that she has seen many students' papers and has frequently been disappointed and at times shocked by the general lack of effort in writing.
"If you didn't receive enough training in high school, use the other resources UP offers and start working on it," Rueter said. "I really believe that anyone can be a good writer, it just takes a lot of work, perhaps more than many people are willing to put in."
Rueter found that many students do not know the difference between active and passive voice, that they do not know how to incorporate quotations well or cite accurately and that some lack a general work ethic about their writing.
According to Rueter, many students aren't trained to edit their own papers.
She always recommends reading a paper aloud before turning it in, so that students can hear their mistakes.
Another strategy is to have someone else look at the paper, such as a friend, writing assistant or professor.
"These are common sense tools that can help improve not only your grades but also your writing skills in general, but many students just don't do those things," Rueter said.
Rueter said that helping students become better writers should be part of the curriculum at UP, but it is not the responsibility of the professors to hold each student's hand and walk him or her through how to write a paper.
She recalled talking about the issue recently with her fiancé. He told her that his mother failed a course in college because she left out a quotation mark. The professor told her that plagiarism was unacceptable, and he failed her.
"If you look at this example closely you can see how much more relaxed college writing expectations have become over the past 40 years or so," Rueter said. "We just aren't held to the same expectations as our parents and grandparents were. Why is that?"
English professor Lars Larson thinks that UP students are prepared for doing adequately in college-level writing courses, though not necessarily for writing with excellence.
"To a great many students, writing still seems a matter of 'filling pages' rather than developing an idea comprehensively," Larson said. "They often harbor the notion that there's nothing beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay."
According to Larson, fixing the problem means giving high school and college students as many writing opportunities as possible, and allowing them many opportunities to revise, since that's the stage where students learn the most and make the greatest leaps of excellence in their writing.
"But given our culture of spectacle and the fact that we mostly do informal social writing, high school and college may be students' last chance to give their writing muscles a vigorous workout," Larson said. "That's a big responsibility for those two institutions to shoulder, but where else might it come from?"
Sophomore Jessi Pinnock said that she was prepared for Biblical Traditions, although she didn't take any college writing classes, such as Introduction to Literature, prior. Biblical Traditions is the third in the series of writing-embedded courses, with the other two being writing-embedded philosophy and writing-embedded English.
"It was a really hard course, but I ended up with an A and was really happy with my final paper," Pinnock said.
Theology professor Carol Dempsey offered further insights into the relevance of the University's writing-embedded courses. What these classes strive to do is lay a solid foundation in lifelong writing proficiency.
"The writing-embedded courses are not just courses they take to satisfy the core. They are courses that are going to give them life long skills," Dempsey said.
Dempsey doesn't think students are doing enough critical thinking in grade school and high school, and she wonders if teachers are holding students accountable for their writing across all the disciplines.
She also thinks that students have got to unplug themselves from cell phones and iPods, and learn to embrace silence.
"We live in a fast-paced society and one that is overloaded with information coming into us from all directions," Dempsey said. "The writing process takes time and it takes concentration and it takes listening to our thoughts and it takes time to order our thoughts and it takes planning."
According to Dempsey, one way to improve writing skills is to become more focused readers of good literature. Students have to be engaged readers of all their texts for classes, and not just skimmers of content, she said.
"Reading helps you to understand style," Dempsey said. "Reading and writing go hand in hand."
Dempsey, who used to teach writing and research in grade school and high school, said she knows what students can do and can't do.
The burden is not just on the classroom teacher, said Dempsey, but on the student.
"Students need to put the time into their writing and need to see it as a skill that is always in need of being honed. For no matter what needs to be written, whether it be a report, a paper, a letter, an e-mail note, a legal brief, a marketing plan, a journal entry or whatever the task may be that requires a sentence to be written," Dempsey said.
"Writing is as much a skill as it is an art, and, as such, we all have the raw talent. But that talent, like anything else, needs to be cultivated."
In order to become better writers, Dempsey recommends that students practice repeatedly, and also to learn to proofread their papers and take advantage of the opportunities available through the writing resource center.
Students should spend time thinking about their papers and planning them before they start to write in order to have clarity of thought before they put pen to paper, she said.
"The clearer the thinking, the clearer the writing," Dempsey said. "You can't write a paper the day it's due or even the night before it's due."
