Five Steps to Better Student Writing?

I met Roger Graves a few years ago at a conference, and he is an entirely sensible individual.  So when I happened upon a recent short piece by Roger in University Affairs, “Five strategies to improve writing in your courses,” I paid attention.  As the director of a university-wide writing program at the University of Alberta, he frequently fields questions from colleagues on the magic “fix” for student writing.  There isn’t one.  But there may be five.  Borrowing liberally from the work of John Bean, Graves lists four critical elements that teachers can build into their assignments to help students – and adds one 911 number to call for support.

1. Identify and help your students to understand the genre of your assignment.  Students need explicit instruction in genre conventions, and they need models to understand concretely what kind of writing and thinking is called for by the genre.

2. From the beginning, students need to know what is under evaluation.  A rubric or evaluation checklist helps them as they write and revise, and cuts down on your time spent answering the “but what do you want, Miss/Sir?” question.

3. And they need both time and directions to revise.  Build in time for peer feedback or teacher-guided discussion of drafts; then your students may take more seriously your exhortations to revise, revise and revise.

4.  Assign short, informal writing tasks that permit students to generate and explore ideas for formal assignments.  More preliminary writing; less night-before data-dumping and plagiarism.

5. And the 911 number belongs to the Academic Skills Centre.  If we can’t seem to make progress on sentence-level problems in individual conferencing with students, let’s not neglect to refer them directly to the expertise that might make the difference.

Graves explores in more depth the reasons why students often struggle with university-level writing in this piece from 2013.

Image Credit: AUCEgypt