I have learned a tremendous amount about writing since I have been teaching writing. Some of it is stuff I already knew, but didn't know I knew. But most of it is stuff I have seen in the mistakes my students have made and trying to figure out ways to help them. Most of this is not my own idea, but the advice of people who have been doing it a lot longer than I had, at least when I started teaching. There are all sorts of studies in a wide variety of publications that offer suggestions to improve writing and an analysis of successes in that process. We had a very enthusiastic faculty development program when I started at my university and I took advantage of it to improve myself as a teacher, and as a teacher of writing.
In the process I myself have become a better writer. Follow me below the sunburned cloverleaf for some lessons learned in teaching, ways to improve students' writing, and please participate in the comments with suggestions of your own. What is the best advice you have ever had, and what works for you in writing and teaching?
What I came in with when I began teaching was a basic proficiency with words. Grammar and spelling are foundational and I had those because of good education when I was in Elementary and Secondary school. I also had read a lot as I grew up. There were always books around, and my parents took us to the public library all the time. My Dad and Mom both read aloud to the family. We grew up with words, and the beauty of writing, both fiction and non-fiction. This is a very important element in writing. If you do not like reading, or simply do not read, you don't know how the words fit together. Creating an argument and building to a conclusion are done differently when you are doing it in writing, and students need to understand that to be effective.
I start out by telling students that writing and speaking are essentially different languages, or at least different dialects, standard and colloquial versions of English (just as there are variations in other languages, like hoch Deutsch and the regional versions that are actually spoken, or Arabic). Slang and informal construction may be fine in some written assignments, but research writing is more carefully constructed than that. There are phrases that you use in spoken English that do not belong in scholarly writing, whether because they are simply incorrect ("based off of" instead of "based on"; "should of" rather than "should have") or because they are informal (contractions, first person, ending sentences with prepositions). And I ask them to emulate the writing style of the articles they read; if they are not reading as they do research, and just trying to pull specific information from the articles (which is a problematic shortcut, as it doesn't really allow you to learn knew things -- you are looking to confirm what you think you already know).
Computers have made a tremendous difference in writing. For those of you my age and probably not much younger don't you remember typing your papers the night before they were due? No first drafts, no revising, last minute typing late in your dorm room or at your kitchen table, making corrections with white out or those little pieces of white chalk-faced paper that you held over the paper and retyped the mistakes to cover them. If you were organized you wrote out a really detailed outline before typing the final version of the paper; if you were not you really winged it. Some really better-than-thou folks actually wrote out the paper long hand and then typed it (or hired someone to type it for them). Can you imagine?! I only did that one time. Mostly it was typing from a very extensive outline (sometimes cutting up the pages I wrote my notes on, to tape the notes onto a clean page, thus making an outline), and I was good enough. I got As on papers. But I could have been better with a first draft, and it would have been easier to write and revise if I didn't have to type out every page from scratch. So much easier I probably would have done that. When I was going to graduate school I saved my money to buy and take a computer with me so I could do the revision much more easily (I knew how great it would be because I had typed my senior thesis on one of the six computers in the basement of the university library). I bought a PC junior, the ones that were advertised with an ad that had Charlie Chaplin. I was so far ahead of any of my fellow students when I got to Toronto!
When I was a graduate student in that huge city, my colleagues were scattered miles apart, and we couldn't get together at 2 in the morning to read and comment on each others' papers. But you still wanted feedback (and it was before we could send the paper electronically -- did you know there was a time they made computers without modems? Do you remember before there was an internet?). So we would pick up the phone and call each other and read the papers aloud. In many ways, this is the thing that has been most effective for me in proofreading a paper. In slowing down, reading every word, and trying to follow an argument through listening to it (on someone else's paper), I became a better writer and better listener, a better argument-constructor. Even today, when the friends I was in graduate school with are in the UK (if not Sudan) and Iraq (sometimes Spain), and my friends and colleagues here are not specialists in my field, I find reading my papers aloud, even to myself, is very useful. I catch misspliced sentences and places where my writing simply doesn't make sense. Spelling mistakes are also easier to find. And the other thing that helps me more than just about anything else is to have the paper done earlier than the deadline, preferably a week or more. This allows me to come back and reread it and see the text with a clear view, as after that time I no longer know what I had planned to say, and I don't see that written, but I do see the words that are actually on the page.
I encourage students to read their papers aloud, to do multiple revisions, and to give themselves enough time to revise their papers with unbiased eyes. And believe it or not (they don't), I can tell when someone has given himself or herself enough time to do just that. I know when a paper is researched and written at the last minute. I remind them over the course of the semester what stage they should be in for their research (you should have identified your sources by now, you should have an outline, you should be writing a first draft by now). But that staged you-should-be-here-by-now instruction doesn't necessarily work. So I tried something else. I decided to break up papers into multiple stages. In a current assignment, for example, the first is researching an author the student has been assigned. Then the students produce annotated bibliographies. The stage I am evaluating now is a complete annotated bibliography, a detailed outline, and two pages of the final paper. I am spending a tremendous amount of time grading these, writing lots of comments, and generally offering suggestions for improvement. It has taken me longer than I wanted to and the students will only get them back next week, after I have had them for two full weeks, but the comments will hopefully help them to be successful in their final paper. We will see.
Along with that there is the issue of not waiting until the last minute to actually write. One of my professors in grad school told me that I should not wait until I was finished with my research to start writing. I hadn't but I hadn't actually figured out why I was starting the writing so early. In retrospect, it was helping me figure out where the weaknesses were in my arguments, what questions I still had to answer, etc. And it also meant that the horribly issue of actually writing the dissertation was not as intimidating. When I finally sat down with the majority of my research to do the writing, over half of the text had already been written. It was in draft form, but editing has always been easier for me than writing from scratch. If they have never tried it out, my students won't know if this is a technique that will make things easier for them. My job is to encourage them to figure out how to succeed in a challenging task. Maybe also to have fun at it, but that is not something I can show everyone.
I believe that writing research papers is a very important way of actually learning the material you are studying. And writing is a skill that is incredibly important for success in the "real world." That is why I spend so much time on giving my students as much feedback as I can. And the things that have helped them have also helped me. I wish I had known all of these tricks when I was an undergrad. And even a grad student. I am better at this now than I was. I hope tomorrow and the day after I will be even better.
What helps you in writing? What helps your students? Is writing as important to you in your classes as it is to me, or is it something that is more important in humanities disciplines than it is in yours? Comments, as always, are very welcome.