High
schoolers must learn academic writing skills that will keep them
afloat in college.
Will all high school graduates go to college?
No. But all high school graduates ought to have the basic
skills for college anyway. That's because the academic
writing skills colleges expect are not really different from what
employers expect of high school graduates.
The only real difference is that colleges lay out their expectations
in excruciating detail so dummies can understand them, while the
manager at Piggly Wiggly expects you to be smart enough to identify
basic writing skills on your own.
Writing skills colleges require
The academic writing skills colleges expect are not very sophisticated.
College requirements include such writing skills as:
Not one of those items requires writing talent or great intellect.
They also don't require mental maturity. Each should be well within
the ability of every high school graduate.
What am I saying? Those writing skills ought to be within
the ability of every sixth grader. You don't need to
be a Shakespeare or a Faulkner to write a complete sentence.
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Colleges want basic written literacy
Although colleges expect incoming students to have basic skills,
I consider myself lucky if half my first year composition students
can write at the eighth grade level. I have had students in my
college classes who wrote at the third grade level.
For years, I took high school graduates considered not-yet-ready-for-college-writing
and got them ready in anywhere from five to 15 weeks.
If I could prep those kids for college work in that short amount
of time, there’s no reason you can’t do it in grades
7 through 12.
You may feel, with some justification, that giving students only
basic skills is hardly doing enough.
Go as far beyond the basics as you can, but make sure each of
your students can write a sensible, 400-500 word expository essay
in an hour, complete with correctly
spelled words, reasonably correct grammar
and punctuation, and normal capitalization.
