Better Writing: ‘A Page Per Year' Plan

 

Q. What needs to be done to help students become better writers?

 

Writing instruction has "gone soft" in recent years, as teachers have aimed more toward creativity and expression than research, conventions and organization.

 

It's apparent that writing about one's feelings and relationships, or offering one's opinions on a current topic in five paragraphs, have not done the job of preparing students for college. Up to 65% of two-year college students are in remedial English classes, and up to 34% of four-year college students need that intervention after an expensive K-12 education. The same need for retraining in writing goes in the workplace, where a great deal of money has to be spent by corporations to make up for what students have not been taught.

If research term papers are required in colleges, and good-sized reports in companies and in the public sector, it seems fairly simple to assume that the best preparation at the high school level for these tasks would be to have students write a research paper or two and prepare a major report or two. Yet a study done for The Concord Review in 2002 found that while 95% of high school teachers thought research papers were important or very important, 81% never assign a 20-page paper and 62% never assign a 15-page paper of the sort students may be asked for in college.

 

If schools want to improve students' ability to do the sort of writing that they will need in college and at work, they should undertake the Concord Review's "Page Per Year Plan." This would assign a one-page paper to each first grader, to write about something other than themselves, and add a page each year, so that 6th graders would attempt a six-page research paper, and 10th graders a 10-page one, and so on, until every single 12th-grader could come to know more about her subject than anyone else in her class by writing a 12-page research paper.

 

The plan is like good writing: it's simple, it's easy to remember, and it works!

 

Homework: See more good advocacy for writing on www.tcr.org

 

Copyright 2005 • One in a series of educational advice columns by Susan Darst Williams, www.DailySusan.com, a writer, wife and mother of four who lives at the base of Mount Laundry, Neb.