Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/52321
your turn by Carter Daniel How to Improve Student Writing —And Business Education ONE OF THE few points academics universally agree on is that college students don't write very well. Among the commonly used descriptions are "timid," "formulaic," "cliché-ridden," "unconvincing," "ama- teurish," "awkward," "uninteresting," and, most com- prehensively, "dull." My contention is that most students write poorly because teachers aren't clear about what they should be writing. What do we mean when we tell them to "write a paper"? In real life, people write reports, speeches, articles, letters, memos, columns, audits, briefs, poems, plays, pamphlets, advertising copy, manuals, and books. But no one ever has to write "a paper" except in school. When students are asked to write a paper, they shift into "college-game" mode, where they try to learn the rules and beat their opponents. To figure out the rules, they ask questions like "How long do you want this to be?" and "Should we express our own opinion or just give facts?" and "Is it OK to use slang?" To try to out- wit their opponent—i.e., the instruc- tor—they share insights with each other, such as "This professor likes lots of examples" and "He's big on global stuff, so hit hard on that." Predictably, the resulting papers are artificial, ste- reotyped, and useless. For years, I told my students that writing is much less often "right" or "wrong" than it is "appropriate" or "inappropriate." But one day I real- ized that students have no way of knowing if their writing suits the sub- ject unless they know what kind of document they're writing—in short, if it's appropriate or inappropriate for what? And at that moment I hit upon the transforming insight that every written assignment must have a real-life counterpart. This idea really came home to me when a late col- league showed me a very bad student paper about the influence of technology on the workplace. The paper consisted of obvious comments like "Ancient people did not have a great deal of technology. . . . With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, everything began to change. . . . In the 20th century, electricity replaced steam. . . . Computers began to replace human beings in factories. . . . Technology has indeed had a pro- found influence on the workplace." My contention is that most students write poorly because teachers aren't clear about what they should be writing. 64 January/February 2012 BizEd I asked the professor who the student was in the assignment, and to whom he was writing. The professor snapped back that the student was a student and was writing to a professor. He added brusquely, "Writing is writing, and it doesn't make any difference who's writ- ing to whom." He was absolutely wrong. Like many people, he thought that bad writing can be explained by deficiencies in language, technique and knowledge. But most often papers are bad because stu- dents don't know what kind of writing they're supposed to be doing. Suppose that the assignment had not been "Write a paper about the effect of technology on the workplace," but "Write a speech for your boss to deliver to the American Society of Engi- neers on how engineering has changed business practices." The student would have known what to say, how to say it, and how technical the paper should be. The professor would have had a stan- dard for judging whether the content was appropriate, necessary, and suf- ficiently technical. For both, the assign- ment would have been much clearer. It's easy to think of other examples. If an instructor tells the class to "Write a paper on the economy of Finland," students don't know how long or how technical the paper should be. They don't know whether to recom-