, 9 tweets, 3 min read Read on Twitter
Hey, @chronicle, rather than publishing the zillionth of this type of essay, let me offer a suggestion, interview a guy who wrote a book looking deeply at the barriers standing between students and writing well. chronicle.com/article/Our-St…
I don't have all the answers, @chronicle, but I can promise that my book, Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities at the very least opens up a new avenue of conversation about the problems that gets beyond this crap. jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/why-th…
I am going to explode with frustration if I read another essay about what's wrong with student writing from a guy who in the essay himself TALKS ABOUT HOW IT'S NOT HIS JOB TO TEACH WRITING! He admits he has neither the time, interest for incentive to do it!
Yes, his argument is that we need to change the incentive structures, but his ideas are hugely disconnected from the kinds of shifts that must and could be done. It's almost a parody.
He also quotes student work directly in the opening which a writing teacher would not do. You can exemplify the sorts of errors one sees in student writing without shaming specific students. You can also do it without signaling that you think students are defective.
"nor" incentive.
And get a load of this suggestion. "Retooling" tenured professors as composition teachers as though there isn't already a wealth of highly skilled composition teachers out in the world eager to do the job, but unable to do so because of their contingent status. WTF?
This guy is plug ignorant about how writing works. Sentences are not the "staples" of this kind of writing. Ideas are. If the student's sentences are troubled it's because they don't have access to ideas that they can grab ahold of and express. That's a pedagogy issue.
I promise that the word salad the professor decries in the first sentence is being delivered because the student believes that what the professor sees as word salad is what that professor wants, a performance of erudition. That misapprehension can be addressed...easily.
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