Few people would argue the importance of writing as a communication tool; yet many of these same people decry the quality of student writing at virtually all grade levels in our nation’s schools.  It’s as if writing has become a neglected area of study, recognized as important, but somehow left to others to teach.  Just what is the status of writing in our schools, and what can be done to improve the situation?

A report by the National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges helps shed some light on this issue for us.  The report notes that formal attention to writing “. . . leaves a lot to be desired, in both school and college.”  Specifically, the Commission points out that more than 50% of first-year college students are unable to produce papers that are relatively free of language errors.  The results were no better at the school level.  The findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as the nation’s report card, indicate that while 80% of students in grades 4, 8, and 12 are at or above the “basic” level of writing, only about 25% at each grade level are at or above the “proficient” level.  These results are not surprising when you consider that, at the elementary school level, data from NAEP indicate that practically all students (97%) report spending three hours a week or less on writing assignments.  In high school, only about half of twelfth graders report being assigned a paper of three or more pages once or twice a month in English class.  And almost 40% reported such assignments “never” or “hardly ever.”

What these results tell us is that many students do understand the language and can write at some level.  However, they cannot apply those skills in systematic fashion to produce writing at high enough levels of skill, maturity, and sophistication required in today’s global economy and work place.  In other words, they can write, but not well; and that does not bode well for their future.   The challenges for our schools, therefore, include providing more time for writing and writing instruction, assessing results fairly and accurately, and offering support for teaching it.

Time is perhaps the greatest challenge both in teaching writing and producing it.  Establishing a writer’s voice and a feel for the audience, and mastering the mechanics of grammar and usage, are daunting tasks in themselves.  Add to that the importance of understanding the distinctions among expository, narrative, and persuasive writing, and the time necessary to accomplish all of this seems endless.  The organization of many schools often compounds the dilemma.  At the middle and high school levels, many teachers face more than 120 students daily.  Teachers who ask simply for a one-page paper weekly are overwhelmed with the challenge of reading, critiquing, and evaluating the product of their request.  In order for them to teach writing effectively, and to critique those papers meaningfully, teachers need manageable class sizes.  At the same time, writing labs or scheduled writing conferences need to be considered as part of the school’s writing program.  At the elementary level, it is not class size that interferes with the goal of devoting more time to writing.  Rather, it is the competition writing faces with the array of other important skills and subjects teachers must cover in the course of a day.

No matter what the cause of the problem, it is essential that we find a solution.  Here are some thoughts.

A quality writing program has to include an assessment component.  Without accurate and reliable measurement of what students have learned, neither the academic officials and parents, nor the students will know the full extent of students’ progress and growth.  To be sure, writing assessment poses its own set of difficulties.  For public schools, standards often differ from state to state.  In addition, unless readers have been trained, they may have different expectations for student performance.  Moreover, writing assessment should involve sufficient time to produce the writing, different pieces of writing designed for different audiences, and include measures of writing mechanics as well as overall development and organization.  Teachers need to be given support in the reinforcement of the writing skills they are teaching.  This requires writing to be part of the curriculum beyond the work done by teachers of English.  Using a rubric, with clear definitions of writing terms and examples to help identify different writing features, teachers in every content area can acquire the skills needed to assess their students’ writing.   Furthermore, students themselves can apply the rubric and, in so doing, begin to understand and adopt the elements of quality writing. 

Technology today offers increasingly reliable automated essay scoring programs that enable students to practice writing, receive instant scores, and revise the essays following discussion with their teachers or using online tutorials, exemplar papers, etc. (see http://erblearn.org/schools/achievement/writing.) This saves teachers enormous amounts of time while giving students opportunities to write and write often.

Another way to optimize teaching time and improve writing is to institute a writing conference period into English teachers’ schedules.  Teachers could then schedule individual students for writing conferences, seeing perhaps two or three students per conference period.  The students could bring a recent writing assignment for discussion, or the teacher could use pieces from a portfolio of student writing.  It is a way to focus on writing intensively as a means to reinforce the skills taught in class.

More and more research supports what those successful in business have been saying for a long time: the need to write effectively is an essential skill in their day to day work.  That led the National Commission on Writing to conclude that, “Writing today is not a frill for the few, but an essential skill for the many.”  The way to eliminate the neglect writing has suffered is to act on their recommendations: increase the amount of time students spend writing; ensure that assessment is fair and includes prose actually created by the students (not simply answers to multiple-choice items); and provide professional development so teachers will evaluate student writing using common performance expectations and consistent standards.  In fact, if students are to learn, they must write. 

(Source:  Report of The National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges, 2006)