justplainbil

Just Plain Bill

“My students can’t write well enough to be taught!”

I used to have neighbors who were a highly educated husband and wife team. They were both published writers, with PhD’s, and the husband also had extensive experience teaching writing at the university level, as well as on numerous Native American reservations in the Southwest.

Soon after the couple moved in, we were conversing about the subject of creative writing, and the conversation led to the statement by the husband, “college kids can’t write today so I quit my university teaching job due to frustration. They didn’t know enough to learn what I was teaching.”

I was somewhat taken aback by such a strong statement, especially since I’ve been teaching business writing at a community college for many years, and, although I find that many students don’t write as “well” as I had hoped, I found the majority of my students were interesting in improving their writing ability and were able to enhance their writing competence level during the semester.

I do believe that if someone hasn’t learned how to write well by the time they’ve completed 12 or more years of school, there could be challenges to overcome to improve their writing ability - and typical teaching methods may not work. This is especially true if the person has been told many times over that he or she “can’t write”

Once I started teaching business writing, I found many students had a lack of confidence concerning their writing, and it was a challenge to get many of them to put much of anything down on paper. In addition to weekly writing assignments on the computer, I also required students to write 100 words or more in class on topics that were of relevant to business writing in general, and specifically of interest to getting a keeping a job.

I realize that there is little, if any writing by hand in the business world but I found by requiring this process, many of my students were able to enhance their writing ability through their hand-written assignments.

In researching the differences between writing on a computer (key boarding) and writing by hand, I found several citings that identified the different mental and physical process at work when using a pen or pencil versus a computer. Without going in the scientific differences, I found, through personal experience, that many of my students were able to write more effectively by hand, regardless of their protestations that “I couldn’t read their handwriting”. (I assured them since I had taught first graders I was proficient at reading elementary-level handwriting.)

As the fruit seller cries out at my local farmer’s market, “don’t be shy, give it a try”, and you may be surprised at the improvement in writing skills that may result!