Teaching Thursday: Teaching Writing

This past semester, I’ve begun to reflect a bit more consistently on not just how I taught over the past 15 years, but how my students have changed.  While I guess I am vaguely aware of the difference between Generation X, “millennials”, and  “generation y” students, I am much more in tune with the small scale changes in student practices that I see week in and out in classroom.

Most of these little changes have to do with how students write. So here are the six most profound changes that I’ve seen in student writing over the past decade or so.  None of them are earth shattering or beyond what a reasonably conscientious teacher can repair, but they all appear distinct to the current group of students.

1. The Rise of the Semicolon. When I was in college and graduate school, the semicolon seems exotic, strange, and probably obsolete. If I was going to use a strange punctuation mark, I would tend toward the double-dash. It’s been years since I’ve seen a double dash in my students’ papers.  On the other hand, their papers a littered with semicolons, and most of these are used incorrectly. I don’t know when the semicolon stormed back into our students’ writerly consciousness, but I’ve started to ban it in my classes. 😉

2. The Slow Decline of the “Undergraduate Slash”. It was once common for undergraduates to avoid difficult word choice issues by deploying the renowned/infamous undergraduate slash. This mark would allow/enable students to use two words when only one was really necessary/appropriate. Over the past 5 years of so, the undergraduate slash has all but vanished from student work. This is a good thing.

3. The Stubborn Passive. I blame advertising for the persistence of the passive voice in student work. While I no longer militate against the use of the passive voice as much as I once did, I find that it is still ubiquitous in student writing. In particular, students use the passive when confronted with something unsavory in their writing. For example, it is easier for the students to say that “African Americans were killed in the South during Reconstruction” or “Germans and Japanese civilian targets were bombed during World War II”.

4. Capitalization. There was a time when I would read whole stacks of student papers with only an handful of capitalization (and all of them would be things like capitalizing the word “President” when referring to the President of the Unites States or the word “During” in a book title). Today, however, I regularly see papers with dozens of capitalization errors even from decent students. It is easy for me to blame “text message culture” or the informal style of emails, but it seems to be more than that. Somewhere along the way, students have forgotten how to capitalize.

5. Colloquial Writing. When I first started teaching, I had to constantly work to convince students not to use words like “whilst” or “amongst” in their writing. Obviously, students were erring on the side of very stilted diction.  Recently, students have tended to err the other way. I have received a spate of incredibly informal papers even from upper level students. Perhaps this trend fits the conventional wisdom regarding “the millennials” who had embraced less formal ways of interaction supported by the so-called “internets”.

6. The Growing Purview of “However” and “Yet”. Students have increasingly used these words to create compound sentences. For example: The Emperor defeated the Gauls, however, he was not as successful with the Germans. While the use and abuse of “however” is a longstanding issue in student writing and I suspect the use of it to link complete sentences in the place of “but” comes from our growing willingness to use accept it at the start of sentences. I do recognize, of course, that “however” is a conjunction (e.g. You can write however you want to write), but I do not like it being used in the place of “but”.

I’m sure my readers have encountered some new tendencies in student writing and I’d be curious to hear about them!