DE Oracle @ UMUC

Writing Wrongs: Observations for teachers of Adult Learners

Edwin Sapp

Collegiate Professor

School of Undergraduate Studies

Published: January-February 2007

Category: » Online-pedagogy » Assessment-feedback-rubrics

Adult learners at the University of Maryland University College come in at least four distinct varieties:

• Those who write well, or even superbly (often occupying positions in the community or workplace that task their writing skills daily)
• Those who never became proficient in writing
• Those who have been employed or in social environments for a decade or more where their previous writing skills have dwindled from lack of use
• Those who have an intense fear of the written word, thus remaining conquered by that fear when faced with any writing task and generating self-fulfilling prophesy with every attempted sentence.

To those who would assist the weaker writers in their classes — adults who fall into the latter three categories — I offer two observations and some additional commentary, based on three decades of teaching over 9,000 students with all levels of writing skills (from junior college ENGL 101 folks to Graduate School of Business professionals), plus hundreds in various private sector and Department of Defense positions.

The observations are not profound, but they ARE crucial to your success in addressing their "writing wrongs."

• Adult learners NEVER benefit from a "remedial" approach to learning the ground rules of writing in the English language, and
• Most adults have far fewer errors to correct than the average teacher perceives.

Even though screening places some students who have needs for "remedial" assistance, you are quite likely to have a mixed bag of writing skills in any classroom for no other reason than a student who passed Freshman English a decade or so before might never have used the skills developed from that experience.

What I find more disturbing about many writing-challenged students in the 2006 classroom, however, is their inability to analyze and process and take action; not their native writing skills per se. I have read three-page, single paragraph memos from students in their final year at UMUC. These folks have NO understanding of how to order information and present it so others can comprehend it. Invariably, I find that their inability to express themselves effectively with the written word stems from their inability to READ, to THINK (that is process information), and to ANALYZE. These folks are not three bales short of a load mentally — they simply do not understand how to analyze — to reduce macro challenges to individual components, order the components, and contemplate any kind of action as a result; that compounds the problem when you try to help them see mistakes and self-correct.

A Remedy Worse than the Disease

When I began teaching survival writing skills to folks in the work place, I quickly discovered that a "remedial" approach (going back over diagramming, defining the parts of speech, etc.) does not work very well because most poor writers didn't understand the first time they were taught and their visceral, emotional reaction to another threatened failure becomes a complete barrier to learning. There is not very much written on the topic, but I have located some experts over the years, and they helped me approach the kind of errors we see at UMUC in an entirely different way.  The approach I suggest in this article addresses both the organizational and mechanics problems such students face, while helping them quickly gain the analytic skills required to self-diagnose and correct both types of writing errors. 

In January, 2001, in a pilot study for the dean of the Graduate School at the University of Maryland University College, I reviewed the results of a pilot study on 54 graduate students with poor writing skills.  Six of the 54 actually performed WORSE in their writing competency after attending a remedial writing seminar; the rest either improved SLIGHTLY or remained at the same level, based on their performance on pre and post-testing.  "Remedial" righting of wrongs simply does not work.

This Old House

I introduce students to the art of writing business reports and correspondence by comparing the process to moving into a new house.  Most writing-challenged adults think they have to compose a business letter or report from the beginning to the end, building evidence leading to a climactic "bottom line" on page two or five.  Freshman English exposition encourages that approach (thesis statement, topic sentences, five-paragraph structure with introduction and conclusion).  Advanced writing texts are no better:  most offer polished examples of profound writing, and some half-heartedly show a few "bad" examples — but ALL the examples are complete and read by the student as a done deal.

When you move into the new house and the movers and your friends have silently slipped away, you are facing chaos at its most unnerving extreme.  Only the truly novice homeowner would begin to clear a path along the route guests would follow, burrowing deeper and deeper until all was shipshape and tidy.  That approach will generate ultimate frustration, most often resulting in the "movee" quite literally boxed into a corner, attempting one poorly-thought-out approach after another to get the job done.  The seasoned movee clears the kitchen and one bedroom before retiring to a good night's rest on a full stomach, knowing that he or she has a priority action list for getting the rest of the house in order later on.

In short, the person who focuses on function rather than form works much more efficiently and with much less stress.

In very much the same way as the experienced movee accepts clutter in some holding area as a natural part of bringing order to the house, so the effective writer focuses on the main idea and leaves the other thoughts as clutter until that part of his or her house of words is straightened up and ready for inspection.

The writer who plods through from introduction to climactic conclusion invites writer's block at every turn, slows to half-speed by correcting prose that may never see the final copy, and totally misses the key to effective 21^st century business writing: understanding that the harried reader wants the "bottom line" FIRST, followed by the rationale — exactly opposite of the concept for an award-winning Freshman theme on legalizing marijuana or saving the goldfish.

Consider for a moment, the pictures of a "perfect" living room in any home decorating magazine.  The pictures and text provide an invaluable vision of the completed task, but they are of absolutely no use to the neophyte home handyman who wants to makeover the homestead in the magazine's image.  For that approach, the eager lord or lady of the manor must turn to some step-by-step guides.  And that we have just done by suggesting that business communication is best constructed from the center outward, rather than from beginning to end.

But note what has happened here: first there is the example (perfect report sample, perfect living room); then there is the DESIRE to create something that good (unencumbered by fear of failure).  You can help create that desire by restoring hope to a student who has reached the "what's the use stage" and is taking your required advanced writing course in his or her last semester with fear and trembling.  Restoring hope is simply a matter of showing such students that there is a logical, self-administered cure for their problems and that those problems really are NOT as severe as other teachers have indicated.  But, I still have to prove that assertion, don't I?

As a first step, we must consider the tools and the skill required to use them.

What Kind of Tool Am I (Using)?

ALL English sentences end in a period and contain one complete thought. Yes, you add a curly symbol over the period for a question and a straight line for an exclamation, but most people only have problems with the contents of a sentence that declares or states something. Student problems with sentence content fall in three categories: incomplete thoughts, too many thoughts, or unbalanced jamming of components into the container. All three reflect a student focused on self-expression with no awareness of the effect his/her attempt is having on a reader.

If a student has a habit of producing sentence fragments, for example, all he/she has to do is write a paragraph, then read the last sentence, then the next-to-last sentence, etc and the out-of-context fragment will show up. Eventually, the student will discover the phrasing that causes fragments for that particular student, and thus will be able to catch problems in a front-to-back review.  Most remedial grammar texts discuss four or more types of fragments, their generic causes, and how diagramming will identify them.  But that approach assumes that the student suspects that there IS a problem, doesn't it?  Isn't that a lot like driving a car with a "check engine" light on, then opening the hood to discover that the engine is still there?  Any further driving could cause serious damage and any further fragments can blow an effort at communication completely out of the water, with the driver/writer never the wiser for the warning.

Of the eight parts of speech, only three cause the most problems. Of the errors in using parts of speech, agreement and verb endings are the most confusing for students, and, of the times these errors cause a problem, USUALLY this occurs with very specific verbs or other words (such as using "their" to modify something singular). Almost always, these are speech issues rather than writing issues.  Speaking habits often carry over into our writing.  For example, the "polished" writer might call a friend and say "I am looking to buy a car" but NEVER use two verbs (and one of them completely useless, at that) in a report for school or work.  The novice, however, doesn't know the difference.

In my seventh grade home room we were given ten spelling words each week.  On Fridays, the teacher called out the words, we wrote the correct spelling, then used them to write a ten-paragraph essay using each word in context.  I missed school the day we learned "through" and guessed "thru" in desperation.  I used that word nine times in my essay, losing a whopping 27 points for my effort, and getting a "D-" on the result.  I complained, noting that I had only made one error.  "No, you made NINE," was the teacher's mechanical reply.  To this day, I don't see my error as worthy of a D-, but I started observing how other students were graded.  Ones who fouled up the verb "to be" rarely ever had a passing score on anything.  Others had a hang up with "the boy picked up their book" (which can be absolutely correct if the tome is subject to community ownership).  Many of your students were bruised in this battle and come to you fully convinced that, no matter WHAT they do, they can never "get it right."

The only internal punctuation with absolutely deadly ramifications is the abused comma. There ARE errors in using semi-colons and quotation marks, but not as many, and those are much easier to explain in ways that make the problem go away.  Remind the guilty that commas setting off incidental information (including the name of a state after the name of a city) come in pairs.  Note that ALL items in a series require a comma.  (If you review grammar text of two decades ago, you note that dropping the comma before the ending "or" or "and" was encouraged.  All that changed with a Supreme Court case that awarded $25 million to Tom and $25 million to Dick and Harry as a SET — like peanut butter and jelly or peaches and cream — when Dad left his money "to my sons Tom, Dick and Harry."  The court ruled that he would have used the comma if they were to share equal thirds).

We put periods and commas INSIDE closing quotation marks because Lin-o-type machines broke the lead slugs with those characters in newspaper articles using proportional fonts such as Times New Roman.  The double-length quotation mark held up longer.  All other punctuation follows more logical rules, but students who know WHY the period and comma get different treatment never make the mistake again.

What's a Mother to Do?

Next time you examine a senior student's botched sample of written English, look at the errors and try to categorize them.  Does the student have a massive comma problem?  Address it.  Is the problem one of agreement?  Under what circumstances?  Isolate it. 

I examined the pre-tests of 250 employees of a regional electric company at the CEO's request.  They were pitiful writers and were costing the company thousands of dollars annually because of poor communication skills.  The CEO was at his wit's end because the remedial writing teacher he hired first quit in frustration when the employees couldn't learn how to diagram a sentence.  I diagnosed their problems, taught them a few rules (some noted in the paragraphs above) in ten hours of concentrated class work.  A few months later, the ecstatic CEO told me that ALL the employees had improved so significantly that the company now was saving thousands of dollars.

Righting Wrongs

So, if you have students writing "wrongs" in your classes, help them identify the category, then attack their individual problems.  Teach them that "by the yard, it's hard; by the inch, it's a cinch."  As you will soon discover upon close examination, few students have hopeless clusters of severe problems.  Most repeatedly make only two or three errors in their writing.  The aggregate of repeated single common verb problems in a paper, for example, can be daunting to any student dismally surveying the sea of red marks you contributed to the "broken" offering.  In fact, that sight is every bit as overwhelming as the endless piles of boxes in every room of your new home.

Contemplate the old adage that one fish gives the hungry person a single meal, while learning to fish feeds the family for a lifetime.  When you help the struggling writer really SEE that he or she has only one or two "show-stopper" problems, help that writer learn to recognize their presence, and teach the cure in a functional way, you have just taught another human how to fish — thereby righting their wrongs and giving an appreciative writer wings.