You can help your students polish their writing skills by integrating tasks into your course, breaking large assignments into smaller bites and injecting enthusiasm into projects, writes Harriet Swain
You have to admire the student's argument. It is persuasive, well structured, packed with supporting evidence and passionately expressed - verbally. However, she has, yet again, failed to write a decent essay. If her writing is to improve, so must your own verbal powers of persuasion. In fact, you have to reassess your whole style of teaching.
Sally Mitchell, co-ordinator of the Thinking Writing project at Queen Mary, University of London, advocates improving students' writing by integrating writing skills into the curriculum of every course. This is likely to involve rethinking conventional methods of assessment, dividing assignments into smaller writing tasks that are assessed more regularly - or sometimes not assessed at all.
"Writing becomes a cumulative process where students are developing ideas regularly on the course rather than just at high-stakes moments," Mitchell says. She suggests that rather than asking engineering students to produce a report, which they often do badly, get them to write up just the results. In this way, they can concentrate on one specific part of report writing at a time.
"It is slightly more structured," Mitchell says. "But the aim is not to spoon-feed students but rather to equip them to succeed when they come to do larger pieces."
Whatever writing task you set, it is important to be clear about its final form, its purpose, its audience and the role you want the student author to play, she says.
Alan Durant, professor of English studies at Middlesex University, agrees that it can be helpful to break down the complex process of writing.
"It is not necessarily that people cannot do something or do not know how to do it," he says. "Often it is that they cannot do all the things at the same time. When they are thinking about getting the grammar right, they cannot get the ideas."
He suggests getting students to jot down the main points of their argument and then to imagine how they would explain them to someone with no knowledge of the subject. Get them to develop these points and to break them down to almost paragraph level. The second stage of the process is to allocate the material they have collected to different points of the argument; the third is to turn this into prose; the fourth is to go through the essay ensuring that it has proper signposting throughout (in terms of howevers, therefores and the like); the fourth is to edit; and the fifth is to sub-edit. Only at that stage do students need to be distracted by spelling and grammar.
"The metaphor for writing is not 'digest material, have inspiration, compose'," he says. "It is 'take material, organise it and build something'. It has to be constructing rather than composing'."
This means that both the planning and editing require a fair amount of time and effort.
Teachers also need to help students work their way into a topic by covering different angles and questions before they describe the students' main written assignment, he says. And he stresses that these structural techniques are the same for all levels of students, from school to postgraduate.
Joan Turner, head of the Language Study Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, says it is important not to make students feel remedial when teaching them writing skills. Although you must show that you appreciate how different academic culture may be from the rest of their lives, you must also make clear that they will be expected to adapt their writing to this culture and that this will involve substantial work.
Phyllis Creme, researcher and teacher at University College London's Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching, suggests that students keep learning journals so they can record their progress through the course.
Lecturers could also leave five minutes at the end of a session to allow students to write down their thoughts about the topic covered, or could start a seminar by asking students to write a note to themselves on what they think the seminar will be about.
"All the time you need to use writing to help students articulate a sense of the subject," she says. This will also help achieve the goal of detaching writing from assessment wherever possible.
David Morley, poet and director of the Warwick Writing Programme, says it is equally important to detach students' reading from the demands of the curriculum.
"They should be as enthusiastic readers of everything that is off the curriculum as they are of everything that is on the curriculum," he says. This allows them not only to make original connections but also to get real pleasure from the reading and writing experience, he adds.
To this end, Morley stresses the benefits of reading aloud, and of getting students to do the same - performing all the rhetorical tricks that the writer will have employed. This will help students to learn such tricks for themselves.
"I think you should work on any kind of prose with as much care as poetry," he says. "That shows in its performance. You have to say: 'This is going to be swashbuckling all the way through.'"
Further information
How to Write Essays and Dissertations: A Guide for English Literature Students , by Nigel Fabb and Alan Durant, is published by Pearson Longman, June 2005.
Queen Mary, University of London Thinking Writing Project: www.thinkingwriting.qmul.ac.uk
Warwick Writing Programme:www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/
TOP TIPS
- Incorporate the teaching of writing skills into your course
- Stress the importance of structure
- Don't worry about carrying over good ideas about good writing from lower level education
- Let students practise writing without fear of assessment
- Recognise that spelling and grammar are important but that the argument comes first