5 step essay? February 8, 2007

I want to write and speak correctly.  “Correctly” may or may not be a debatable term, but in general I want it to mean that I am not ridiculed for the way I use the English language.  If the trend really is towards descriptivist linguistics, and if the attitude really is “as long as you can be understood, who cares,” then I suspect the public would not be nearly as interested in the unfortunate verbal mishaps of the president. 

 See? Respectable language use IS valuable. Let’s teach it in our schools!

 Education standards vary quite a bit around the country, and the debate about what to teach and what to test will probably never be over.  Right now I have heard very little about grammar and writing being taught in schools.  There was a decided lack of such instruction in my high school, where an informal survey in a 9^th grade English class revealed that only 4 out of about 30 students knew what an adverb was.  But I digress.

When I first started reading the article in the Miami Herald entitled “Class of 2010 Must Pass Writing Test to Graduate” by Nirvi Shah and Tania deLuzuriaga, I was interested that it seemed that students would be held to higher writing standards.            

“To earn diplomas, this year’s high school freshmen will have to pass a test that nearly half of last year’s sophomores flunked: the writing section of the FCAT.

The writing test includes a timed essay and a relatively new multiple-choice section. The latter has inspired a renewed emphasis on teaching grammar and on breaking the kind of casual writing habits that allow for speedy e-mail and text messages.”

(Complete article)

Communication through writing is very important and my experience with high school students and peer editing is that writing well is a skill that does indeed need to be taught.  But this brings me to what I found to be even more important in the article.

While students might learn to improve their grammar because of the new graduation requirement, some teachers worry it will encourage more formulaic writing: Teachers often train students to write stylized five-paragraph essays with clear ideas and transitions. While more advanced skills like style, analysis or development of voice may be rewarded, they aren’t necessary for a passing score.

”If you look at the sample papers, the ones that consistently score in the upper ranges are a strict five-paragraph formula of introduction, body, conclusion,” said Denise Graham, the English Department head at John Ferguson Senior High in West Miami-Dade. “A student who strays from that on an exam could be penalized.”

That brought me right back to high school social studies, where we learned to write an introduction, two argument paragraphs, a paragraph refuting an opposing viewpoint, and a conclusion.  I could crank out those essays in my sleep, but I hardly look at that as an example of good writing.  Is it a start? Yes.  Is it enough?  Not even close.

Of course, testing writing is hard to do without the standardized Scantron sheets that allow mass testing, but there has to be a better way than instructing robotic paragraph producers.