Pupils Take Pen in Hand to Bridge Gaps in Writing

For many students--whether in secondary school or college--writing is a necessary evil. Just ask James Pusey Jr., a San Diego City College freshman.

“If the world ended tomorrow, would I have to turn in this essay?” Pusey wrote last month in an English composition paper titled “Just Another Essay” for instructor Dorothy Smith, who is also president of the San Diego city school board.

“Undoubtedly yes. Life just isn’t fair. . . . Candidly speaking, essays aren’t bad; they’re terrible. It’s nearly impossible to find a topic to write on; the writing is extremely time-consuming; worst of all, your writing is read by a complete stranger.”

Pusey got a B-plus for his essay. But for too many of Pusey’s peers on area campuses and in schools countywide, their lack of pleasure over writing has translated into a lack of adequate skills, particularly when putting together expository essays analyzing literature or making persuasive arguments to buttress a thesis.

Help With Skills

At San Diego State University, more than a third of the 36,000 students rotate through the university’s academic skills center for an expository writing course after failing to pass an English competency test.

Smith--who also teaches the skills courses at SDSU--recently took her class step-by-step through the parts of a cause-and-effect paragraph by using a story about the troubles that a newborn puppy causes in a crowded household: The topic sentence; coherent supporting arguments; a conclusion.

“You’ve got to be able to take your ideas and put them on paper so that the other person knows what you’re thinking,” Smith told her students. So many students entering college have “so little experience in writing, they have to be told everything didactically,” she said later.

A nationwide survey several years ago showed that the average secondary school student wrote only 250 words a semester--about a page.

Smith’s dismay, built up over years of having to teach college students grammar and syntax that is supposed to be part of junior- and high-school courses, played a major part in her thinking that led to the common core curriculum proposal for the San Diego city schools. That proposal, to be phased in over the next several years, will toughen the course content of most secondary school classes and include more writing.

Writing Project

Other teachers at SDSU’s academic skills center have helped set up the San Diego Writing Project with school districts in the county in an effort to improve student writing and eventually put the center’s remedial courses “out of business.” The center offers training to elementary and secondary schoolteachers on how to write better themselves, on how to reduce the fear of writing for students, and on how to manage the workload when 35 essays come across their desks.

The state California Assessment Program (CAP) standardized test for students now requires a writing sample. And because politicians and parents use CAP scores in determining their level of support for public schools, many school districts are placing a greater emphasis on the teaching of writing.

Across the county, teachers are experimenting with a variety of techniques to improve student writing. They caution that progress in the field is evolutionary and will never show dramatic short-term gains. But the impressions of educators throughout the county and comparisons of writing tests between 1984 and 1987 among San Diego Unified district students indicate that more students are beginning to express themselves cogently and with a greater sense of style.

At the Poway school district’s Black Mountain Middle School in Rancho Penasquitos, every eighth-grader this year spends two days a week in John Winbury’s computer writing lab. Last week, the students discussed how to report a story as a journalist would, learning about summaries and transitions as well as bright introductory paragraphs that lead readers into the rest of an article.

“We do pre-writing first, where we show them samples of what a real writer does, and I read a lot of different examples to them,” Winbury said. “Good modeling is very important.” Because students now use computers, they are far more willing to revise initial drafts of essays or stories, Winbury said, whereas students once rebelled when asked to tediously rewrite in longhand.

Training Teachers

Winbury has been a mentor teacher under the San Diego Writing Project, helping to train other teachers. “When you finish college (to become a teacher), you don’t know how to teach composition; it’s not taught to teachers,” he said.

Among the ideas given to teachers: Write an assignment along with students to see how difficult or easy the assignment turns out to be; have students read essays of others in the class and suggest changes to their peers before final drafts are written and turned in; avoid redlining each and every mechanical error to the point where a student becomes terrified to put anything on paper.

Winbury called up on the computer screen one eighth-grader’s essay on “couch potatoes” and showed how the student has learned transitions and use of anecdotes during the half-year already spent in the class. The story still had grammatical shortcomings, however, including sentence fragments.

“If he were not in this class, a regular teacher might have him working over and over on writing perfect sentences,” Winbury said, “and the student might never get to writing paragraphs or essays.” In too many cases, teachers have been trained to spot errors when reading a paper rather than focus on the process of improving writing, he said.

Martha Johnson of SDSU’s skills center cited an example of a San Diego city third-grader who wrote a valentine to his teacher, but misspelled the word valentine. The teacher’s only comments were to criticize the misspelling, thereby killing the student’s initiative to write again.

Grammar Debate

The question of when and how much to emphasize grammar within the new efforts to teach writing is debated vigorously among teachers.

“Grammar certainly has its point, but if all I’m doing is harping on mechanics, then students are going to be terrified and lose all desire to write,” Winbury said. “So the (writing) project says that a student should write the essay first and then go back in subsequent drafts and work on the mechanics. . . . We should not be obsessed to the point that they don’t write.”

Joann Berman at Bell Junior High School in Paradise Hills said statistics show that while all students in a typical first-grade class raise their hands when asked if they enjoy writing, only 60% do so in the fifth grade and as few as 30% raise their hands by the ninth grade.

“I do grammar with the kids after they do some writing so I can use their writing to show why grammar is important, why complete sentences are important, why verb tense agreement is important,” Berman said.

Last week, when her class was studying Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Berman had them write about their first boyfriend or girlfriend and the first time they were alone together. After completing their first drafts, the students go back over their writing, first with each other and then with Berman.

“I don’t care if the students know all the names of grammar points but I want them to understand what goes where and why,” she said.

Need the Basics

But English teacher Mark Tuttle at Poway’s Mount Carmel High School said he sees too many college-bound 12th-graders still unsure of basic grammar and syntax.

In his advanced composition class, an elective for seniors wanting additional preparation before going on to college, Tuttle drills his students in the proper agreement of clauses and modifiers, in how to recognize run-on sentences, and in other basic points that students ideally should already know.

“If kids came to high school with all the sentence skills mastered, if they knew about different structures, then I would have higher expectations and move more quickly,” Tuttle said. “I think it’s important for a student to look at a paragraph and know not only that something is wrong but identify what is wrong.

“I can’t subscribe to the idea that just turning kids loose to write and write and write will automatically lead to desired results.”

Tuttle hopes that his students, once they have combined grammar with essay practice for a semester, will avoid the pitfalls of almost 17% of those students taking English placement tests at SDSU who did not know how to construct a readable essay around the word adversity.

Johnson of SDSU’s skills center has been active in training teachers, but still decries the lack of writing in most non-English courses.

“A lot of non-English teachers are uncomfortable with making writing assignments and in general have become more at ease with multiple choice,” she said. “And a lot also go home mighty tired just from dealing with large numbers of students, from drug and discipline problems.”

But Johnson said that science teachers, for example, can require lab reports to be written using complete sentences. And the teachers can use the same techniques suggested in English classes to lessen the paper load, she said.

“So if you have five biology classes with 35 students each, you might carefully go over the papers of maybe 10 students each time and only skim the rest, but with the students never knowing when their particular work is going to be critiqued,” Johnson said.

“The teacher can also select two or three outstanding papers to read to the entire class as a way of motivating students,” she said.

The director of the skills center said that all students can be taught to write better but that schools must have more money to train teachers across-the-board rather than only in selective schools as is done now.

“It’s not an educational issue per se,” said Don Basile. “We know how to teach writing and communication, but it will be expensive.”