A Suggestion for Improving Student Writing

A Suggestion for Improving Student Writing

Students seem to like writing as much as adults like public speaking: It’s almost universally dreaded.

But there are few assignments that can tell us as much about how well a student can think.

Can they stay organized? Can they communicate clearly and simply? Can they communicate forcefully? Can they be persuasive? Can they care about something? Can they live comfortably with ambiguity? With nuance? Can they address counterarguments and contradictions? Can they make concessions? Can they change their minds?

These skills are very much  in demand.

So how can we help students become better writers?

The best student writing I see is usually produced by the students who do the best research. The poorest student writing I see is usually produced by the students who think of reading and writing as separate activities. 

These latter students appear to assume that their classmates write well from some magic they themselves weren’t born with. This misunderstanding is probably a mix of comforting and disempowering: comforting because if they identify as a “bad writer” they can excuse themselves to focus on skills that offer less resistance and more affirmation; disempowering because it suggests that being a good writer is beyond their control.

Research in Writing

While not everyone can be George Orwell through sheer force of will, there are fundamentals everyone can master. The most basic is so obvious that students overlook it altogether: to write well you have to know what you’re talking about.

Anyone can know what they’re talking about if they put in the time to read and organize their thoughts. Not just textbook summaries and encyclopedia entries, but books and articles that go well beyond what they actually need to know. It’s in these depths that they’ll encounter the nuance that will set them apart from their peers; where they’ll gain the insights that will transform their writing from limpid and shallow summaries of limpid and shallow secondary literature, to compelling and original arguments that move with force, cut right to the heart of the matter, confront counterarguments head-on, and speak simply and clearly.

If you’ve used an iPhone, think of what you saw when you programmed your phone with your fingerprint. You put your thumb on the button and on the first pass it recognized part of your thumbprint, represented by bolded lines on the virtual print on your screen. You moved your thumb and a few more lines were bolded, then a few more each time it asked you to put your thumb back on the button. Then it zoomed out further and asked you to capture even the fringes of your thumbprint, and you had to roll your thumb around to the sides and the top of your print, until the full print and all of its possible permutations were captured.

Think of doing good research and writing a good argument like capturing your thumbprint on a smartphone: your research is going to take many passes to fill in all the gaps in your knowledge and ideas. One book or article will flesh out a certain subject area, and the next will flesh out a different but related subject area. Others will complicate what you’ve already read, perhaps even contradict what you’ve already read, and you’ll have to refine your ideas, possibly even go back to your thesis and edit your foundational claim. This is normal and expected, and it shouldn’t feel like a setback or a shortcoming, but like yet another pass ultimately getting you closer to a definitive “thumbprint.” In this case the thumbprint might be a final compelling argument, or it might just be the confidence you gain from making sense, feeling informed, and having interesting thoughts that are enjoyable for their own sake.

Your writing will also take many passes. Sometimes you’ll be writing about something at the heart of the matter, other times you’ll be closer to the edges—you’ll be setting the stage, fleshing out important nuances, responding to counterarguments, offering context, or bringing things to life with anecdotes and personal details. Much of this you’ll delete as you tighten things up and work to keep your ideas and prose nice and punchy. You’ll go back and forth between your research and writing, your writing and research, your research and writing again and again in a “hermeneutic circle” that produces sudden moments of understanding and sense as if by magic. 

Anyone can experience this kind of magic, but it requires reading enough to know what you’re talking about.

I texted two professors I know about the ratio of reading to writing they do when they’re publishing their own work. Here are their responses:

Response 1 (from my brother, D.L. Noorlander, SUNY Oneonta): 

“Hard to measure in hours because the research might overlap with a different project, spun from book research, for example. From start to finish, idea to published article, it can take a long time, esp. if it’s peer reviewed. Maybe 1-5 years?

“You read a draft of one of my papers in 2018, at a point I thought it was almost done, but it wasn’t published til 2023

“A peer reviewed article in a good journal (conception to publication) would never happen as quickly as one year”

Response 2 (from my business partner, W. Kesler Jackson, aka “The Nomadic Professor”, Utah State, Salt Lake Community College)

“Not sure! Depends on the topic. Probably on average around 30-50 pages for every 1 page of writing (when preparing a text based mostly on secondary sources).”

1-5 years! 30-50 pages!

While you might raise an eyebrow at the bureaucracy around academic publishing, the point here is only that good writing is the result of substantial research, even for paid professionals. Archival research, surveys of existing secondary literature, travel and interviews, oral back and forth with sparring partners and trusted peers. It’s not easy to write well because it’s not easy to be right.

So I want to offer two resources that might help your struggling writers, both of which focus on the reading part of writing, not the writing part of writing.

In the first part of the linked handout you’ll find a list of potential resources for finding good, free, research online. Physical libraries are also good if you happen to live close to a good public library, but this resource focuses on doing research online specifically. The next time your student needs to write something, challenge them to be an expert on that thing. Challenge them to spend 5x or 10x as many hours reading, thinking, and scribbling down notes, as they do trying to write out their argument. These resources will give them plenty to read during those hours.

In the second part of the linked handout, you’ll find some instructions on how to do research efficiently, with a few tips on “skimming” that take all the guilt out of moving quickly when you have a lot of material to go through. (If you think that Dr. Jackson, for example, memorizes all 50 pages of the reading he has to do to produce 1 page of his own writing, you’re wrong. :) Much of what he does is probably captured in these tips on how to read quickly without missing all the important stuff!)

If you approach these resources as “writing resources” as much as “reading resources,” perhaps you’ll see an improvement in what your students are able to do. Whether you do or don’t, I’d love to hear how it goes for you, so reach out anytime: nn@nomadicprofessor.com.

Here’s to helping your students become good readers, smart thinkers, and strong writers!

 

ABOUT OUR GUEST | In college, Nate Noorlander double-majored in philosophy and history teaching. After a stint as a project manager with a disaster repair company, he moved to Beijing, China, where he taught IGCSE and A Level history at the Cambridge International Curriculum Center of Beijing Normal University. He also spent time touring in India and trekking in Nepal. Worn out by the Beijing air, Nate moved home with his family and taught English and history at Mountainville Academy, and then the American International School of Utah. At AISU he developed mini-courses in boredom and awareness (probably close to what many people call mindfulness) based on Heidegger’s ideas about technology, and Nicholas Carr’s ideas about what the internet does to our brains, areas of study that (perhaps ironically) he finds compelling. Done in this time by life in the beautiful mountain west he returned to Beijing, where he taught IB History, IB English, and Theory of Knowledge at the Yew Chung International School of Beijing. When Covid-19 hit he was coaching the boys' basketball team and gearing up for an end-of-season tournament in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, ignorant of what was coming. The trip was canceled, his family just made it out of Beijing on a flight three times its usual cost, and he stuck it out in the shuttered city for another six weeks. When life didn’t change, he left too. Since then it’s been all history with The Nomadic Professor.

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