"Use MLA. Write from Your Heart:" The 2012 Survey of First-Year Writers

--by Doug Hesse

Consider a few facts about the DU Class of 2015.

• Over 60% consider themselves strong or proficient writers who write well in most situations; only 5% think their is writing weak.      
• Over 75% believe that writing will be important or highly important in careers after graduation.
• Most wrote at least 40 pages during the fall 2011.
• More than half spent over ten hours per week in social media; less than half spent more than 1-2 hours reading print texts.

Each January we ask all students enrolled in WRIT 1122: Rhetoric and Academic Writing to answer 15 questions about their attitudes and previous writing experiences. In 2012, 435 students replied out of 872, a rate of 50%.                

Several findings have striking implications for faculty across campus. Following are a few.

Student Confidence in their Writing

As I noted above, incoming DU students are confident in their writing abilities, and they have some reason to be. Most earned good grades in high school courses and seem to have earned good grades in the fall quarter at DU. They’re generally fluent (that is, able to generate sufficient words on most topics) and they’re generally able to produce error-free prose.

However—and this is the big however—many of them have not experienced the challenge or complexity of writing assignments they will confront in college. For example, very few high school students are asked to use a particular theoretical framework to interpret a particular set of data or analyze a particular text; very few are asked to articulate the bases of disagreement between divergent authors and to argue for one position.

Now, it’s completely normal that college writers encounter new challenges; learning to write is a long developmental process that continues through the college years. While it’s better to be confident about one’s abilities than to be desultory, there’s a danger that students may miss or dismiss new challenges and complexities. After all, if a beloved high school teacher deemed them an excellent writer, who are professors to demand that they become better? There’s one rub for the faculty.

Past Writing Experiences

Although students come to DU with a fairly rich set of writing experiences, especially compared to students at some other universities, certain experiences predominate.

Foremost is the five-paragraph theme. 87% of our students have extensively followed the formula of 1) tell them what you’re going to tell them; 2) break it into three points; 3) tell them what you told them. Of course, a five-paragraph theme can have 3 paragraphs or 11; what’s common is the forecasting thesis, the partition into three points, and the summarizing conclusion. And, of course, this approach is useful for a range of tasks.

However, most of the writing in the academy or in the world beyond doesn’t come parceled into five paragraphs. Often students adhere rather to the form and formula rather than to the demands of the subject matter or the needs of the rhetorical situation.

Students have also done a fair amount of literary analysis in high school (about 82% of them), writing about a story, poem, or play. This makes sense given that a) most high school writing takes place in English courses, b) most high school English teachers are really trained as literature specialists rather than writing specialists, and c) most high school English curricula focus on literature, especially in the advanced classes from which DU draws its students.

There is no doubt that closely reading literary texts to support interpretations helps build skills for writing about reading. However, analyzing a sonnet is different from analyzing the argument, assertions, and evidence in a piece of nonfiction. Only about 50% of DU students had that experience in high school.

The purpose here is not to denigrate high schools. Especially with No Child Left Behind and the Common Core Standards, coupled with the teacher to student loads, these are challenging times for high schools. Additionally, I’d argue that some writing tasks are developmentally more appropriate for the college years. Rather, my point is simply to give an additional perspective on the basis of students’ confidence in their abilities.

Most Memorable Advice

We asked students an open-ended question about the “main advice and strategies about writing” they remember from high school. The results are a mélange of often-homespun wisdom. For example:

• My junior teacher gave me the advice that an essay should be like a lady's skirt: long enough to cover the subject, yet short enough to be interesting
• Don't overthink
• Anything other than 5 paragraphs is ridiculous. Use MLA.
• Write from the heart.

I sometimes bring a page of these comments into my own first-year writing class and ask students to synthesize them. The task resists doing, but students eventually recognize that the most common advice has to do with formal matters: number of paragraphs, number of sentences in a paragraph, number of drafts, the importance of proofreading, and so on. Almost no student cites the writer’s need to consider audiences or any rhetorical strategies for developing arguments.

We also ask students to explain their favorite and least favorite kinds of writing experiences. These questions yield a fascinating dichotomy. A good percentage of students love “creative writing” and an equally good percentage loathe it. A good percentage of students love very specific tasks with explicit guidelines, almost algorithmic checklists, and an equally good percentage find those tasks abhorrent.

The challenge to DU professors, of course, is that any given class likely has students holding both perspectives. Now, students tend to sort themselves into majors that align, more or less, with these views. Our longitudinal study of writing as teased out this last point. But that’s a topic for a future newsletter.