Take Your High School Writing to the Next Level
I’ve been teaching college undergraduates for about ten years now, reading thousands of pages of their writing. I also coach high school students to write better essays. As end-of-term essays from my undergraduates pile up, awaiting commentary, I’ve started wondering, how can high school writers “graduate” to college-level writing?
My answer benefits not just future college students at large but specifically those pursuing AP Literature, IB History, or another humanities track. Here are two recommendations: one practical habit students can immediately implement and one that requires a bit more commitment.
1. Perfect your sentences.
Annie Dillard says, “An extra word in a sentence is like a sock in a machine.” High school writing assignments often have incredibly detailed guidelines, so much so that students often don’t think about the clarity of individual sentences. Instead, they’re ticking boxes on a rubric. College writing assignments sometimes have detailed parameters, but more often they don’t. As a result, the expectations for the precision of individual sentences tends to increase, as students have more freedom to shape their essays. (N.B.: I do not mean that sentences need to be more complex or employ abstruse vocabulary. You simply need to write sentences where every word counts.)
How do you do this? Beyond improving grammar, which is important, it’s equally important to think through the purpose of the sentence (and the purpose of the essay, but that’s another topic). If I’m working with a student, we may spend an hour on a single paragraph. We’re not chasing a platonic ideal. Instead, the idea is to think more carefully about the role a sentence plays and the variety of ways to improve it. This should put questions of sentence length and complexity in service of a more fundamental question: is this sentence doing its job?
Consider this opening line from an actual student essay:
In his book called Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky attempts to highlight the issues stemming from the tendency of American authorities to indoctrinate its individual (therefore narrow) beliefs and policies on its own domestic population and the world community as a whole.
Apart from grammatical problems, notice the redundancies, awkward phrases, and vague or misapplied terms. Here’s how you could revise it:
In Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky highlights several issues stemming from the tendency of American authorities to unjustly indoctrinate its own people and the world.
This punchier, more decisive statement gets to the heart of the topic much more precisely and efficiently. That’s what we’re after.
2. Read more widely and regularly.
And—this is crucial—talk or write about what you read just as often. One teacher of mine would tell students, “Until you can clearly articulate an idea in writing or speech, you don’t understand it.” Because many essays require engaging with assigned reading(s), students often assume their mental comprehension of a text is both a precursor to writing and an unwritten essay in itself, waiting to be transcribed. The problem is that reading is a very different skill from writing. It’s better to think of writing less like transcription and more like the process of thinking. This should lead to more time drafting and revising.
As you read more often and more challenging material, and develop a habit of responding to it verbally, you will improve your capacity to think and write. This means you’re less likely to panic when you read material you flat out do not understand, which will happen at some stage in college. Writing will then be an avenue towards understanding rather than the product of it.
This will also open up a skill that is much more crucial: contributing to the conversation that goes on amongst experts. That, ultimately, is what college writing is about.
