In the article ‘Why Kids Can’t Write’, Dana Goldstein, an education writer for The New York Times, reports on how teachers are avoiding basic grammar and writing skills in the classroom and how some teachers are going to do to change that. Judith C. Hochman, Founder of an organization called the Writing Revolution, displayed examples of students work. She says, “It all starts with a sentence.” Hochman focuses on the fundamentals of grammar but many educators are less concerned with sentence-level mechanics and more concerned about children drawing inspiration from their own lives for their writing. According to the most recent study done by the National Assessment of Educational progress three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency…
The writing expected from college courses is one that most are unfamiliar with. Although students learn basic English skills throughout grade school and up to high school, most of the advanced steps are forgotten by the time the student is to enter college. Paired with this, are the nontraditional students, who haven’t studied advanced academic language for long periods of time. Professors are expecting students of all kinds of study to have a high academic vocabulary and high writing skill. Often times a gap in remedial writing courses within the first semester or so.…
Reflective writing as a genre allows for a combination of personal reflection and critical thinking all intertwined into one. I turned my reflection essay into a new reflection that focused on a different level of the education system that would allow for me to reflect on my first semester of college to back up my allegations against the school system. When attempting to revise my essay in a new way I reread my old one and found an interesting theme screaming out of the paper. It was saying, “high school and Regents did not prepare me for college.” I took the idea a little further and expanded it to the SAT, that is a similar testing style to Regents, that similarly did not prepare me for college, and through research I found that income status…
When it comes to producing academic papers my writing style remains adaptive to meet the rhetorical context of a specific course. Meaning, my focus and attention is directed towards proper formatting, and writing a paper that engages a reader. My process involves narrowing in on a topic, gathering sources, free style writing, creating an outline, writing a draft, revisions, and then producing a final…
In writing classes the most common first day question is whether or not spelling and grammar will count. Most commonly students focus more on how they are writing and if it is grammatically correct or not rather than writing their inner thoughts. Jack Connor in his essay, “Will Spelling Count?”, argues that writing requires meticulous efforts through his use of cause and effect, comparison and contrast, and division and classification. Connor displays cause and effect throughout his essay to show how different ways of teaching affect students performance and effort level. When Connor first began teaching he wanted to be a different type of teacher.…
6.) This got me thinking about minimal marking. Minimal marking is probably one of the few tools that would function to significantly improve student writing because it attaches a new punishment contingency to errors --> it is a lot more work for the students. 7.) Reminder: punishment decreases the likelihood of a behavior occurring again in the future.…
Have you ever gone to school and didn’t know how to write or start an essay? I’m pretty sure this all happens to us, which is why we attend school to improve our writing. Seeing myself at the age of five, I’ve always wanted to write a paper as if I was a writer. Now being a ninth grader, I have improved a lot. Improvement came in a variety of ways such as, using proper vocabulary or even spelling a word correct.…
In “Five Myths About Writing”, the section discussed beliefs that caused issues when students were learning how to write. Four out of the five, I already knew they were false. However, I did learn that the myths all had one thing in common. These myths were exactly how teachers from elementary to high school had taught us to write essays.…
Writing proficiency is below grade levels across the country; therefore, teaching practices must be a concern when looking to improve students’ writing abilities. This article mentions something that Santrock also stated, finding effective ways to teach writing can be difficult because students are all at different skill levels. (Zumbrunn and Krause, 2012, 346). To determine the best way to teach writing, interviews were done with important authorities in the area of writing who concluded…
My writing process coming into junior year was quite flawed and would go moderately like this: I would try and start with some hook that at least sounded like it related to the topic I was assigned. I then added a thesis that did not sound like total trash that included exactly what I planned to discuss. As I wrote the rest of my essays, I would sometimes realize there was something I felt added to the argument’s appeal, and after adding it to the body paragraphs, I summed it up in a couple words and squeezed it into my thesis. That was about the maximum amount of revising I would do for my essays. My decently crafted essays contained simple diction with a few SAT words I remembered while writing thrown in awkwardly.…
However, studies have shown that correction does not work and will not produce a change in students’ academic performance. Usually, when a student writes in a way that goes against the norms and rules of Standard English, a teacher will correct their technique and tell their students that they are incorrect and are not writing the right way. “Instead of seeking to correct or eradicate styles of language, we may add language varieties to the child’s linguistic toolbox, bringing a pluralistic vantage to language in the classroom” (Wheel & Swords, 2004). When a student uses AAVE, he or she is not making errors in Standard English, but is writing or speaking correctly in the language patterns of the home and of the community. The goal of every teacher should be to maintain the language of a student’s home while also adding linguistic tools to their toolbox.…
The things I learned that I did not know before reading the chapter was that… An essay is a short paper written on a particular topic. Basically, anything can be an essay that’s with in an average of five paragraphs that’s not so lengthy. It usually does not necessarily require a comprehensive understanding of a particular topic. My writing skills should be presenting my thoughts in a logical and a clear manner.…
Many school programs concentrate on preparing students for writing in colleges while some do not concentrate as much in that area. Many students learn just enough to pass a class. Is that the teacher’s fault or student’s? Some curriculum does…
What is more important is that students practice writing. Teachers also need to devote time to feedback through individual sessions or “conferences”. There are typically two types of conferences: a content conference in which the teacher asks the student about his or her story and a skill conference where the teacher emphasizes basic writing skills such as spelling, punctuation and…
English Writing Styles Formal Paragraph High school is a particular time of education in a student’s career that allows them to explore interests of their choice along with more complex classes that they are made to take. In high school, there are four tiers to the graduation process. Students go to high school from the general grades of ninth grade all the way to twelfth grade. During these drastically short four years, students must choose classes that will help them with their future plans of study.…