Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities

by John Warner

to “increase student achievement,” we should be asking, Increase how? Achieving what? These are not value-neutral propositions.

Academic writing is a genre like any other. We should not pretend it is the only context in which one can learn to communicate effectively.

But when students say a class was “hard,” they often mean “confusing” or “arbitrary,” rather than stimulating and challenging.

As we’ve seen, students do very little writing, and the writing they do is often in the service of proving competency on standardized assessments.

Sentences matter very much, but they are not first.

What Might this mean for claim evidence and reasoning

And here I have arrived at one of the other important experiences students must have as early and often as possible: failure.

So much this!!!! It’s ok to be wrong and fuck shit up the first time

If I were to grade this assignment using a traditional method, I would use their rewrite of the process portion of the assignment, because this is the writing most reflective of what students might have learned about the writing practice. But why bother even grading it? I don’t care how good their instructions are for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich;

I need more help with us what things should we actually grade and what thing should we grade because what he’s saying here makes perfect sense it has no need to be graded