4 ms·

How so?

chongli 3y ago
Because it prioritizes exercises that are easy for a teacher to mark over exercises that develop real writing skills. Everything is broken down into elementary mechanical tasks and marked with rubrics. Writing is taught as if it were mathematics, that you can just follow a simple algorithm and you are done! Turns out, neither great writing nor mathematics work that way. Both are very hard and require non intuitive leaps of inspiration.
- toast0 3y ago
  Following the algorithms for writing makes you neither a bad nor a good writer. If you learn and follow: tell them what you'll tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them; you writing will be formulaic and boring, but competent. If you do all the things, you'll be an ok writer.
  - chongli 3y ago
    Boring writing is bad writing. If you can't holder your reader's attention long enough for them to get what you're trying to say then you've failed to communicate. If you follow that formula, not only will your writing be boring but too long as well.
    - l33t233372 3y ago
      Step one, then, is to have something interesting to say. Unfortunately it isn’t generally the case that people have something interesting to write at length about, and even more rarely do they have something interesting to say about the specific topic assigned.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    I struggled with a teacher in high school who expected me to write essays with a formula I could never really master, there might have been other things going on but a big one was that I read so much that I had so many examples to work from that her formula didn't make a lot of sense to me. Even though I struggled to get a "D" in her class I am certainly not a bad writer, I've made a living at times writing, I've written book chapters, blog posts, contracts, standards documents and all sorts of things. I struggled to master the language used in academic writing though.
Swizec 3y ago
The biggest way school teaches bad writing is by asking for minimum word counts instead of maximum.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  I took a two-year course, where our homework was primarily focused on developing an essay at the end of each class (about 14 of them all told). All the classes had similar formats and requirements, and so all the essays also had maximum word counts. I really, really appreciated that, because it surely forced me to distill all my thoughts into the most essential passages and cut out the fat. Occasionally, I would be plagued by a bit of writer's block, and I couldn't think up enough to write, but eventually I could gin up enough logorrhea that I would have a nice tapestry to begin snipping out the wordy and irrelevant bits. And that was my favorite part about the classes, being able to write a really tight research/opinion paper every few weeks.
teddyh 3y ago
See Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM Essentially, students are, from the time they start school until they graduate, taught to write to an audience – teachers – who are both: 1. Paid to read it, and have no real possibility to stop reading because they get bored (teachers will read anything from beginning to end). 2. Looking for, in the writing, evidence that the student has learned the information. Neither of those two things are true of the rest of the world, when they are reading a book or an article by an aspiring professional writer. Therefore, writing to such an audience will require new skills which most people have never practiced.

How so?

Because it prioritizes exercises that are easy for a teacher to mark over exercises that develop real writing skills. Everything is broken down into elementary mechanical tasks and marked with rubrics. Writing is taught as if it were mathematics, that you can just follow a simple algorithm and you are done! Turns out, neither great writing nor mathematics work that way. Both are very hard and require non intuitive leaps of inspiration.

toast0 3y ago
Following the algorithms for writing makes you neither a bad nor a good writer. If you learn and follow: tell them what you'll tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them; you writing will be formulaic and boring, but competent. If you do all the things, you'll be an ok writer.
- chongli 3y ago
  Boring writing is bad writing. If you can't holder your reader's attention long enough for them to get what you're trying to say then you've failed to communicate. If you follow that formula, not only will your writing be boring but too long as well.
  - l33t233372 3y ago
    Step one, then, is to have something interesting to say. Unfortunately it isn’t generally the case that people have something interesting to write at length about, and even more rarely do they have something interesting to say about the specific topic assigned.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I struggled with a teacher in high school who expected me to write essays with a formula I could never really master, there might have been other things going on but a big one was that I read so much that I had so many examples to work from that her formula didn't make a lot of sense to me. Even though I struggled to get a "D" in her class I am certainly not a bad writer, I've made a living at times writing, I've written book chapters, blog posts, contracts, standards documents and all sorts of things. I struggled to master the language used in academic writing though.

Swizec 3y ago

The biggest way school teaches bad writing is by asking for minimum word counts instead of maximum.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
I took a two-year course, where our homework was primarily focused on developing an essay at the end of each class (about 14 of them all told). All the classes had similar formats and requirements, and so all the essays also had maximum word counts. I really, really appreciated that, because it surely forced me to distill all my thoughts into the most essential passages and cut out the fat. Occasionally, I would be plagued by a bit of writer's block, and I couldn't think up enough to write, but eventually I could gin up enough logorrhea that I would have a nice tapestry to begin snipping out the wordy and irrelevant bits. And that was my favorite part about the classes, being able to write a really tight research/opinion paper every few weeks.

teddyh 3y ago

See Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM Essentially, students are, from the time they start school until they graduate, taught to write to an audience – teachers – who are both: 1. Paid to read it, and have no real possibility to stop reading because they get bored (teachers will read anything from beginning to end). 2. Looking for, in the writing, evidence that the student has learned the information. Neither of those two things are true of the rest of the world, when they are reading a book or an article by an aspiring professional writer. Therefore, writing to such an audience will require new skills which most people have never practiced.