The Blame Game

In school circles, it sounds like this:

“If my students had been taught to write in high school, they wouldn’t be writing this badly for me in college.”

I’ve said this. During my first five years of teaching as an adjunct at the University of Michigan-Flint, I would often blame Flint area high school teachers for my students’ inability to write.

The blame game goes on higher up, as well. Theology or biology professors occasionally tell me that the First Year writing program didn’t teach their students to write.

Businesses are also getting into the act. Graduates, they say, can’t think or write. And what is college, if it isn't a training ground for business? 

I suppose high school teachers could get in on it too. Those middle school teachers aren’t teaching what they are supposed to. But why should it stop there? Surely the blame goes further down, though it does start to sound a little odd that first grade teachers have not done the proper job of teaching their students to write at a seventh grade level, though there are obvious signs that early problems with learning to read will set children behind permanently.

Is There A Problem?

This is the blame game, of course. But what is it with student writing anyway? Why haven’t No Child Left Behind programs worked?

We could look at some of the earlier attempts to answer the question that took shape in the 1980s, “Why can’t Johnny write?” One hundred years before the Reagan administration, the first efforts in the 1880s at Harvard to address poor writing led to the first “Freshman English” course. Again, this was designed to teach unprepared students to write for their upper division courses. Why wasn’t that enough to stem the tide of ill-formed prose?

The premise then was pretty much the same as it is now: someone else should do the work that I, as a theology or a biology or psychology professor with content to teach, should not. I didn’t sign up to do the work of the English department.

By the work of the English department, and by writing, of course, the people saying this really mean grammar and source documentation.

Apparently, writing is not really a college course. We should have learned it prior to coming to college. If not, it’s a remedial matter, not a concern for a real college course.

Whose Problem is it?

Tomorrow I am giving a presentation to faculty colleagues at APU, where I teach writing and coordinate the First Year Writing program. I am addressing ways that writing might be considered a real college discipline, conducted and encouraged across the curriculum, and not just in English departments. I’m talking about how writing ability results from a long developmental process through many years of training.

I’m not completely looking forward to this. After all, they will argue, if students can learn to divide and multiply in a math course, why can’t they learn to write well the same way?

But this is how to think about it. Writing is not just a set of discrete skills in subtraction or addition, as my biology and theology colleagues think about it—just grammar, phrasing, and documentation. Rather, as Anne Beaufort, a writing specialist, puts it, writing ability is a complex ability that develops through increasing knowledge in five different domains—content or subject knowledge, genre knowledge, writing process knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, and discourse community knowledge.

My colleagues in other departments are only addressing subject matter knowledge.

My task is to suggest this broader way of thinking about writing development than something that can be addressed in a brush up course or two in usage or grammar.

My overall point (though I will not say this directly) is that we stop the blame game and start thinking about teaching writing as a college-worthy endeavor.

That would be a way forward. The problem, of course, is that it is not a quick fix, which is what we really want. This what we always want for something we don’t fully understand.

If I get a few people onto this slow fix, I’ll consider it a successful talk. 

Works Cited

Beaufort, Anne. College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction Logan: Utah State U.P., 2007