Some Misconceptions

Students write to please their teachers, or at least the majority of us do.  Rather than expressing our true thoughts or ideas, we choose to vaguely skim the surface of a topic, providing detailed summaries but lacking deeper analyses.  We have practiced writing content that agrees with the views of the reader – in nearly all cases, our teachers – because of the fear that our views would clash.

Although we may write with the intention of receiving a good grade, sometimes we just don’t get the grade that we have in mind, and we’re left wondering why.  We may ask ourselves what went wrong because we wrote exactly what the teacher was looking for.

But what if that is what we got wrong?  What if our teachers didn’t expect what we thought they were looking for?  What if “knowing” exactly what our teachers expected from us is all just a big misconception?

Before we can work on correcting the misconceptions and improving our writing, we first have to know what some of the assumptions are:

Some common assumptions shared by students involve summary over analysis, recycling what the teacher has previously said or taught, and an overemphasis of grammar.

Many students believe that if we mainly stick to summarizing, there’s less of a chance of our work being rejected by the teacher for bringing in potentially incorrect analyses – in addition to the simplicity of only writing what we know for a fact to be true.  The problem with this, however, is that teachers do often look for our own application of the topic because it shows an understanding of it and lets our teachers know that we’ve learned something.  Such a grasp of the subject cannot be shown by only mirroring the words of our teachers.

So what should we focus on in our writing?

As student writers, there are several concerns to consider.  There are those that are priorities, and those that don’t need to be attended to right at the start.

Higher order concerns are the priorities.  These include a central focus, and understanding of the topic and audience, and clarity.  If you are writing about one topic, your work should only discuss ideas related to that topic.  Because writing about a topic shares what you’ve learned, teachers look for this understanding through your application of it to a certain audience and how clearly you can express your ideas.

Lower order concerns, while still important, can be focused on after coherently organizing your thoughts and putting them down on paper.  Grammar and mechanics, although often believed to be a priority, can be focused on after making sure you have a rough draft to actually work with.  Rather than investing time and effort into perfecting smaller details only to later notice an issue with the bigger picture, a better approach would be to set the foundations of your work and then work on the grammatical details.

Another important part of improving your writing is looking at teacher feedback.

Editorial feedback focuses on correcting grammar and reorganizing the structure of the work, but it doesn’t provide an explanation of any changes made to the work or give any overall feedback.  Directive feedback is instructional, authoritatively stating what the writer should or should not do.  Facilitative feedback, on the other hand, is thought-provoking and asks us questions that will help us think more critically about the topic of our work.

The facilitative form of feedback does not strictly direct a student how to write, and it could open other perspectives to a topic that you may not have thought about or considered otherwise.  This form of feedback is the most beneficial to us as students, because it opens the door for us to think about the topic of our writing in a new light that we hadn’t seen earlier.

So what are some key ideas to take away?

Teachers assign writing prompts to get a better sense of your understanding of a topic.  An application of this topic, discussing different points of view or tailoring the information different audiences conveys your level of understanding, but this cannot be achieved by only summarizing preexisting ideas or recycling your teacher’s words.  In order to apply the things we’ve learned, we need to make deeper connections and analyses.

So where do we start?

If we push away the pressures of focusing on what we think our teachers want and apply our attention to exploring the subject of our work, then we can find something more fulfilling than the anxiety brought on by a letter grade.