Students’ Poor Writing Skills

The fact that only one in four California students knows how to write (Sept. 29) comes as no surprise to those of us who as graduate student teaching assistants had to grade thousands of freshman essays and exams. However, before you drop the buck on the desks of primary and secondary school educators, consider the following:

It is not unusual for university professors (in the UC system, no less) to announce to their students that “writing doesn’t count” in calculating their final grades. UC Santa Barbara, as an example, has an outstanding center for tutoring in written communication skills. But when some faculty let students off the hook, the students let themselves off the hook. Until curricula and teaching skills improve at the primary and secondary levels, the buck stops on the desk of higher education.

JUDI KESSLER

San Diego

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The report of the National Assessment of Educational Progress mentions almost in passing that students who only have “basic” writing skills also make frequent errors in grammar, punctuation and sentence structure. Well, imagine that! The investigators seem to have missed the causal connections between the more mechanical language skills and the higher-level skills of composition and rhetoric.

Ask any good teacher how to teach writing, and they all say, “Teach grammar, spelling, punctuation and sentence structure. The rest comes easy.”

WILLIAM DuBAY

Costa Mesa