Some More Thoughts on Student Writing

Last December, I wrote up some of my observations on undergraduate writing tendencies based on a stack of student papers from the fall 2011 semester. Having just graded over 150, 3 page introductory level student papers, I figured that I should update the list to reflect some of my new observations and to reinforce the validity of some of my older comments.

1. Capitalization. This remains among the most baffling trend in undergraduate writing. Over the past three or four years, I’ve seen a sustained decline in the use of proper punctuation. Students regularly forget to capitalize people’s names, proper places, and (perhaps less surprisingly) institutions. Some have suggested that this is the rise of “text message English” (or text message english) in which almost no words are capitalized. The argument against that, however, is the concomitant rise of random capitalization. In the most recent group of papers, I’ve seen the word History, Economy, and Politics capitalized. It’s baffling.

2. Fonts. Recently, I’ve started to notice that many papers turned into my feature different fonts in the same text. Sometimes it’s as inconspicuous as a different font in the footnotes or in a clearly “cut and paste” block quote. In other cases, the font will change mid sentence or paragraph. As our word processors become capable of doing more and more formatting and layout-oriented work, they increasingly burden the simple task of presenting text with distracting options that ironically produce a less appealing final product especially for inexperienced users. 

3. The Semicolon. Semicolons continue to be the bane of this generations’ writing. I have banned them in both my introductory and mid-level course, but they continue to make unwelcome appearances in both places. Students not only use them incorrectly (usually to link a complete sentence with a sentence fragment), but even when they do use them correctly they typically produce monstrous, wordily, and complex sentences that obscure meaning.

4. Contractions. I have banned the use of contractions in formal writing in all my classes. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Students are inexorably drawn to contracted words. I even explained that one could set one’s word processor to automatically change contractions into their non-contracted words, but they still appear throughout papers. 

5. In regards. This phrase is a new one to me, but it has appeared in numerous undergraduate papers this semester. It might be related to the tendency to use strangely anachronistic words and British-isms like amongst, whilst, and towards.  In 120 some papers, I counted “in regards” used 43 times in 28 papers.

I realize that language and styles of typography are ever changing, but sometimes I wish they’d change just a little more slowly and systematically in my students’ work.