Why can't America teach writing? | Hacker News Reader

Why can't America teach writing?

simonberens.com

28 pointssberens58 comments

They gloss over the issue of writing being taught primarily through literary analysis in American public schools.

You can't evaluate how good of a writer someone is unless you already know what they are trying to explain. The writing has to be about a topic for which the evaluator and the writer have a common level of understanding. This means that post-modern literary analysis is useless for teaching writing. Everyone can interpret the text any way they want, and each individual is expected to interpret it slightly differently. The correctness of the content is subjective. If the correctness of the content is objective, and mutually understood, then any confusion added during the writing is bad writing. Driving the excess confusion and length to zero is basically the problem of learning to write well.

In practice, writing isn't used to convey mutually understood ideas, it's used to convey novel ideas. But when evaluating writing that conveys a novel idea, the quality of the idea is mixed in with the quality of the writing. That's good for teaching how to think, but it just adds another variable in the way of teaching how to write.

> The writing has to be about a topic for which the evaluator and the writer have a common level of understanding. This means that post-modern literary analysis is useless for teaching writing.

In practice, you're simply criticized for not discussing the context and structure through which you view the work. Arguably that's what critical theory is as opposed to other frameworks of criticism, namely structural theories like marxist and many tracks of feminist thought. Not only is this not a problem at all in practice, it isn't really relevant to the topic at hand because "postmodern literary analysis" doesn't generally exist at the high school and survey level.

That analysis part is key. The short answer is that criticism makes stupid people. Literary fiction provides words for experiences and memories, and when you apply a critical framework, it breaks the associations that the work of art was intended to create and substitutes in the ideology of the framework. This is why universities aren't producing writers. If you want to write well, read a lot, and then try to write something that you can look back the next day at without cringing. Teaching criticism is a substitute for that process, and mainly it makes people immune to good ideas.

The only criticism I think is worth teaching students is that they are being decieved and misled by their instructors and their job is to figure out how and why.

>You can't evaluate how good of a writer someone is unless you already know what they are trying to explain.

I object to this premise.

Trivial counterexample: Is it impossible to evaluate the quality of a novelist because we don't have a common understanding of the plot of a novel until after I've read it? Clearly not.

Even in a post-modernist literary paper you can still judge the writer's cohesiveness of thought and clarity of argument.

Edit:

>The correctness of the content is subjective. If the correctness of the content is objective, and mutually understood, then any confusion added during the writing is bad writing.

I also don't understand how post-modernism comes into it. Is talking about the theme of insanity in Hamlet any more objective/correct than writing about the influence of race in Moby-Dick? If so, how?

We mean different things when we say "good writer", and you get at it by using "novelist" vs "writer".

When professors or employers complain that their students or employees can't write well, and lament the quality of public education that caused the ineptitude, they are talking about writing as a means of communication. They aren't talking about any of the mentioned parties' inability to produce good novels.

A novel is good if you enjoyed reading it, even better if it has re-read value. A good novelist produces good novels. Whether or not you enjoyed reading the novel actually has nothing to do with whether your understanding of the plot is the same as the author's. In order to confirm that the novelist was effective at using writing to communicate information, that information would have to be known as ground truth on both sides of the channel. As an imperfect example: if you had a chat with the novelist, and it was revealed you had a different understanding of the plot, then they couldn't be that clear of a writer, even if you enjoyed the novel.

I have two daughters who were writers. My youngest wrote imaginative, interesting and thoughtful stories when she was 10. Neither of my daughters write now. I was not aware of what was going on with my older daughter, so I missed what happened to her. I know she was part of some online "write a novel" thing -writing over 150 pages, then something happened at school. And she stopped.

With my younger daughter I saw it clearly however. She wrote a very good, interesting creative story. The teacher told her to write it over. Because she had not done the assignment - which was to write something that had two paragraphs. This teacher had not the slightest sense of what she had written, what was good about it or how to help her make it better. He was not a teacher - do we even have a name for people who stifle creativity.

This was not a poor or under-performing school. This was by all measurements a "good" school. Just not a "good" school for kids.

Our educational system is a failure. It is not because of the teachers. It is because schools have embraced the stupidity that the only way to learn is to follow what other people do. And to follow them blindly.

At some of the best and highest priced colleges, students are treated as though they are next generation leaders, the soon to be best and brightest, that their thoughts are worth while.

My daughters learned that their writing was not worthwhile, by someone who learned at school to treat students like the student's own thinking, thoughts and expressions were not worthless but worth nothing.

This particular emperor, our educational system, has no clothes.

Rigid grading structures protect teachers from accusations of bias. Most subjective grading metrics have been eliminated from schools in the name of ensuring perfect equality.

It also protects the teacher from grade grubbing. Every teacher deals with students (and parents) constantly wheedling for higher grades.

Yes. And if we can't grade great writers because it is subjective and we don't understand what makes a great writer, then we also can't grade good writers for the same reason. Or grade writing at all. We can say we like it, but that is subjective. Completely.

Now just for laughs, what grade does "Twas brillig and the slithy toves" deserve? Obviously an "F" because ole Lewis Carroll just could not spell.

Educational institution can and should teach punctuation. And spelling. But teaching writing? They get an "F" for that. And thinking? OMG don't even get me started!! :-)

The writing thing your older daughter did sounds vaguely like NaNoWriMo.

It is not a failure of education system to ask the student to do the actual assignment. The whole "the kid was asked to do the original assignment therefore teacher thinks their thinking is not worthwhile" extrapolation is really weird.

Easily the right explanation

As someone who writes for a living, I often say that there are two components to being a passable writer: a technical understanding of syntax, and exposure to the written word.

Syntax can be taught. When I was in school, I was taught sentence diagramming [1]. Learning to diagram sentences is akin to learning how to compute mathematical equations. At some point, teachers stopped teaching sentence diagramming (I suspect because it was too onerous on English teachers to effectively teach, and because it was too technically difficult for the lower end of students to learn). My wife, for example, who is vastly smarter than me, was never taught diagramming. Consequently her knowledge of English syntax is much worse than mine.

Exposure can’t be taught. You have to read and continue reading. The more someone reads, the broader their exposure. Reading is the best way to increase your vocabulary and learn about different use cases for words. The best writers are avid readers.[2]

If we want to create a generation of better writers we should restructure our English classes. More sentence diagramming and more assigned reading. My guess is there isn’t really an appetite to make English more rigorous. Unlike math, where there are different levels of math offered in school, English is pretty much one-size-fits-all until college.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram

[2]: I’m not suggesting that I’m among the best writers, and I disclaim any errors on this social media post. Even people paid to write can and do make dumb mistakes. That’s why God created editors.

Sentence diagramming is one of the few activities I distinctly remember from middle school. Sometimes we'd walk into class and the teacher would have an interesting sentence on the board from a book he was reading. We'd spend the entire class diagramming it and discussing different ways to write it that might shift the emphasis around or completely change the meaning. I loved those exercises and my understanding of English syntax is so much deeper because of it.

The most valuable non-CS class I took in college was a technical writing class where we wrote documents very similar to the memos, reports and analyses seen in corporate organizations. In particular it taught me how to state my ideas using brevity, directness and accessibility. Prior to this, I had only written essays and poetry for writing classes-- my language was overly verbose and flowery.

90% of writing in highschool is some form of literaray analysis or book report. its next to useless unless your dream is to be a critic.

90% of what makes money in the real world from a writing perspective comes down to persuasion and narrative. most schools don't even try to teach students either of these. the few that do, do so as electives or a very small subset of useful skills among years of tuition in useless literary masterbation.

If you don't understand something, less chance you'll notice your culture is based on it!

I expect I'd do the same if the shoe was on the other foot.

Any consideration or proposal on subjects to be taught in school should start from the observation that the median student in a public school can, a year after the end of high school, read proficiently at most what is offered in middle school, can do sums and subtractions, and certainly cannot do anything with angles, sine and cos, and you get the idea.

So, the answer to the question "why doesn't school teach [writing, taxes, fiscal responsibilities, civic duties, the law, etc.]?" can be found in the capability and ambition of the median student. And 50% of students are worse than the median student.

This applies to regular public schools, private schools or programs for gifted students have different scopes and expected quality of students.

> So, the answer to the question "why doesn't school teach [writing, taxes, fiscal responsibilities, civic duties, the law, etc.]?" can be found in the capability and ambition of the median student.

I took honors level classes in english. I would argue that constructing a persuasive essay or writing a story is going to be much nore approachable that what I spent most of my highschool english classes dong. (reading shit and writing analysis of it). With that in mind, I don't know if I can agree with the notion that it is modulated to the capability of the median student.

That said, its obvious why taxes are generally not covered. if you're straight out of highschool, you probably have a standard w2 which means 10-20 min filling a return in some tax software. If you run a consultancy like I do and have several sources of income, the knowledge required to do your taxes is too complicated to teach in high school. In my case, my accountant takes care of that.

lastly, we don't teach about fiscal responsibilities, civic duties or the law because they wat us to be consumerist little sheep.

I used to ask people what they had studied in school, posing specific questions. I tend to be in the company of (former) mid-level or above students. One question was: which writers did you cover in your English/Spanish/Farsi/French/etc. classes? Nine times out of ten, the answer was, "I don't remember." I was a top 1% student and I remember well the writers we studied. No need to ask them about sin and cosine.

But I had to take 6 chemistry exams in college/Master's, and even though I was in the top 1% of students, I remember virtually nothing of anything I studied related to chemistry. And before anyone says "when you open a chemistry book, memories will flood your brain," I did, for multiple subjects, and I saw no flood, only drought.

That's funny, I remember all the chemistry, geography, mathematics, etc. No interest in the literature stuff whatsoever.

EDIT: It might have been due to the curriculum, perhaps if they had chosen authors which resonated a bit more (or at all) I'd have remembered some of it.

I think it has less to do with the ambition of the median student, but the expectations placed upon them (by parents, peers, schools, society, employers, etc.)

Theoretically, perhaps, empirically, it is quite unnatural, and therefore unusual, for a young pre- and post-puberty person to be interested in writing, mathematics, literature, physics, taxes, technical drawing, and all the subjects that are taught in school. So, not only do you have to be interested, but you also have to have a fair amount of talent to get something out of your many years of schooling.

In some societies, that ambition, when not "natural," is acquired by proxy from parents, accompanied, sometimes, with a dose of self-hatred, stunted growth, and poor social skills' development. A valuable trade-off for some.

I'm not sure I follow or are we saying the same thing? I totally agree that what's taught in school is not typically of natural interest to many teens/pre-teens, but what's the alternative?

The unpopular, but, in my opinion, best alternative is to reduce the hours/years of mandatory schooling. But many are not ready to admit that going to school, after certain minimum targets are reached, is a waste of time for many, from a purely educational point of view.

Consider this: if achieving some greater than minimum educational targets was considered by "society", or people who did not get those higher than minimum target themselves, something to aspire to, something that would make a difference in one's life (after accounting for "ambition", inclinations, and intellectual talent), why there are almost zero viable opportunities (and interest!) for adults to make up for lost ground or opportunities?

Some may say, "it is because they have families, less time, work etc.". But how many spend hours upon hours watching football or drinking with their besties or buddies talking about nothing at all?

It is all quite hypocritical. Yes, "society" says that school is good, important, necessary for a fulfilling life, but in practice it is not considered to be so, after mandatory schooling is over. Let's get rid of this intolerable hypocrisy and let people follow their inclinations.

High school writing is 95% writing unoriginal thoughts and trying not to plagiarize. And 0% learning how to communicate ideas and thoughts. High school research papers are the worst.

It’s super frustrating.

Kind of interesting. Yeah it sucks to write about things that I dont have an interest in. I struggled in school with english. Though looking at my internet/forum use I don't think I actually hate writing.

> every child is monocropped on the same curriculum.

This I get, but at the same time, there really is so much we did learn k-12 that is fundamental to build on. A 12 year old is never going to sign up for algebra or trig. Maybe physics or chemistry but then drop it when you get stuck calculating molarity. I've been trying to catch up on the ml stuff lately and some physics for fun, right now I do appreciate the forced math. Algebra, and trig, pre calc. Im struggling because when I got a chance to blow off math when I was later on in school, I did. Now I'm seeing if I want to understand anything, let a lone do something novel, I have to put in the years of getting an understanding of calculus, linear algebra, stats etc that I don't really have.

Maybe the courses them selves could be more interesting. Instead of 4 paragraph essays and unrelatable classics. Ive gone back to reading books. I think I stopped because of how school treats it. It was stressful if you worry about missing a line and not getting some random symbolism. I actually went back and read great gatsby, much more relaxed. The green light didnt seem to really matter imo.

The exploration can happen outside of school though. Balance less rigorous homework with better extra curricular. Balance sports better somehow.

America isn’t good at teaching anything that requires intensive practice and repetition. My dad’s spent most of his career writing grant proposals and reports for public health projects. Although English is his second language, it consistently fell to him to rewrite the often incomprehensible writing submitted to him by smart and credentialed doctors and public health professionals. His writing style is workmanlike—the most important thing in real-world writing is clarity and organization, not flourish.

As a lawyer, I also make my living writing. I learned more from my dad and other mentors than from school. I was fortunate to have a sixth grade teacher that assigned a lot of 10-page papers. My dad would make me sit down and do multiple drafts with him, giving me markup of papers with a red pen. I did the same thing with the judge I worked for, then after that senior lawyers I worked for. It was probably only in the last few years (I’m pushing 40) that I could claim to have become a good writer. It’s an extremely time consuming process that American schools are simply not set up to perform.

"America isn’t good at teaching anything that requires intensive practice and repetition."

I thought the number one criticism of American teaching is rote memorization and rote repetition and so kids leave with zero deep understanding of what they just did. Just muscle memory that fades.

AFAIK, rote memorization and rote repetition is not effective intensive practice and repetition.

Effective intensive practice and repetition involves doing the applying the same skill repeatedly in different contexts and variations, and particularly in different complex tasks which combine it in different ways with other skills.

Your readers here on HN appreciate your having put in the time. At least I do.

Thank you! ::blush::

This blog post illustrates the problem it purports to discuss.

The “in medias res” lede is gratuitous. The headline does not name the real actor.

The fact is that some teachers and schools teach writing well, and many don’t.

You don’t have to have something to say to start writing. You just have to look at things and describe what you see. If you do that long enough, eventually you will see things others don’t, and that will be your something to say.

Reading deep and wide and well is a precondition of good writing. The culture of literacy is in decline during this age of the image. That’s one of many reasons why Americans may write worse than they once did.

At least America seems to try (and most countries in the Anglosphere, I think).

In Spain, you can get through the whole educational system and not be taught writing at all. I remember being told to write an essay from time to time but without getting taught any specific technique (in fact, I think the only technique I was taught was introduction - body - conclusion, but that was in... wait for it... English class!). I have always liked writing fiction, but I got that from the books I read when I was a child, not from school. I remember being happy when we were assigned an essay, especially if I could use it to write some fiction, but it was a quite uncommon occurrence.

My understanding is also that it is relatively common in America to take a creative writing course in college/university, this is typically unavailable in Spain for STEM students and often may even be unavailable for humanities students.

There is a lot of emphasis (both at school and university) on knowing the history of literature and analyzing classic works, but zero on writing your own.

Just read the rubbish coming out of their districts, administrators, and teachers. It’s grammatically terrible, semantically low quality, and turgid as hell.

I used to seethe every time the denizens of their $30,000 a year private school sent home any messages because the writing was atrocious (same with the public schools). I made more as a writer than these teachers ever did, but when I taught my kids how to write crisply and succinctly, they got C’s. They had to rewrite it in teacherese in order to get good grades.

I think its less to do with writing per se then general educational apathy/mediocrity/low bars. It's not like students can't do it, it's that they are not required to.

The other thing I'd point out is that the spectrum is just so broad when it comes to educational quality in the United States. There is a big difference between going to Thomas Jefferson or Stuyvesant and the local public high school in some rural town or inner city with a 12% graduation rate...

I guess I agree that writing essays about literature doesn't teach you how to write well, but I don't think that means we shouldn't ask students to think critically about things and formulate arguments about them. That's extremely valuable, and isn't given enough emphasis, as evidence by the widespread lack of critical thinking in the world. And while you can certainly mount arguments about things other than literature, I also think we should be asking students to read literature, because having a widely shared corpus is important for a culture. So, if schools have time and resources to teach writing as a separate unit from critical thinking, and to teach literature as a separate unit from both of those, go right ahead and refactor everything into separate modules. On the other hand, if time or resources are limited, it may make sense to combine one or two (or heck, all three) of those things together, leaving us pretty much where we started, and implying that either the premise of the article is wrong, or (if not) that there is some other explanation for why schools don't teach writing very well.

Probably because many people struggle to read with any reasonable level of comprehension. People reading this site are not representative of the public at large, as you know.

They struggle in large part because they aren’t being taught to do that either.

"We should teach writing proportionally to its use cases. If business writing, blogging, research papers, and journalism dominate written content in the real world, why are we poring over the writing of the minority?"

This is another piece of the form "why don't they teach me taxes and cooking at school?". We teach literature in school because schools don't just exist to equip people with "skills" but with what we'd in Germany call Allgemeinbildung (sort of a comprehensive, cultural education), and the American system really built on this Humboldtian idea as well. (it underpins a lot of Western education, generally).

You don't go to school to learn how to get the most likes on Twitter with your blog, you go there to get a foundation and to be able to orient yourself in your history and culture. Many people also rarely need math or sports but they're part of a holistic education as a person.

Even the title question is I think just wrong. Americans can indeed write, just take a look at the amount of excellent American writers. I bet the majority of people writing articles like this were classically trained, it works. Ditching literary analysis for blogging advice is like top schools ditching Scheme to teach a React course, it shouldn't be celebrated, it's the bootcamps instead of Computer Science mentality, it eventually just erodes the educational foundation it is built on.

We obsess about writing skills as a culture, and yet, almost never talk about reading skills. If people suck at reading they will suck worse at writing. And the internet has destroyed most peoples reading comprehension and attention.

Or put positively, if you want to improve your writing, read, a lot. Learn how to read analytical, for pleasure. Read stuff you dislike, disagree with. Understand why. Without a well developed sense of taste and comprehension, writing skills will never improve.

As unpopular as it may be, writing better than average just doesnt have a very good ROI. The market just doesnt value it as much as the author does.

In engineering, writing can be extremely valuable. Multi-million dollar proposals are won and lost based on the quality of writing. It is very important.

Wow, I would have to sit down and think for a bit in order to come up with something I disagree with more than this. Being able to write well is a golden ticket to getting things you want, especially economic opportunities. If you can communicate well, people will trust you with important, valuable things. If you aren’t writing, you’re not thinking as well as you could be, and therefore not communicating as well as you could be.

Really? I see people in my job doing far less writing than they ought to. Little to no documentation, little to no design docs, and where stuff is written, the document fails to explain the why/how of its design, includes grave errors about how preexisting system work, etc.

None of that seems to hold them back: they plow into code head first … and … stuff comes out the other end.

Even Slack messages from many of my co-workers are broken fragments of terrible grammar. The syntax is corrupt … let alone the semantics of whatever the hell they're trying to convey.

And I see no correlation between these people, and failure in the corporate world.

That tells us that people aren’t writing as much as they should, not that writing isn’t a valuable skill.

Looking at the top quartile of every profession I have been involved in, those people consistently write more and better than their peers.

> That tells us that people aren’t writing as much as they should, not that writing isn’t a valuable skill.

It depends on what it means by valuable. We may value it, sure, but in his example the poor communication didnt hurt their performance reviews or salaries.

Valuable means “having a significant positive impact on one’s career opportunities”.

Can you quantify that though? I mean if you look at people who study writing in college the salary outcomes are pretty bad. Im not saying its not useful, or that its easy.

This is a classic main effect vs interaction. Looking at “people who study writing” is not the useful category here, since it’ll include literature degrees (and probably exclude skilled writers who haven’t formally studied writing, to boot). More useful is to consider skilled writers vs unskilled writers within a same profession.

Well if the average is quite low, being above average might not have much of an ROI.

Being a strong writer is incredibly valuable, marketable, and in my experience a pre-requisite for success in the "knowledge economy" (outside of some people that are able to get by on deep technical skills alone).

I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood in the US Midwest, and I went to mediocre public schools. But even so, I learned to write very well. We were taught sentence structure through diagramming in 9th grade; and then we spent the rest of high school writing book reports, term/research papers, and essays. Is this not common in other US school systems?

We started sentence diagramming well before high school. Maybe 5th grade? This was Fairfax County, VA in the 80s and 90s (I finished HS in ‘95). It was also an honors/gifted curriculum, so I can’t speak to what mainstreamed students were taught.

I think the biggest problem is that most of the English curriculum after basic grammar and spelling (at least in my experience) is like 90% reading and 10% writing about the things one just read. While reading is clearly a necessary component of writing, it is equally clear that one does not learn to write by reading. One learns to write by writing, and I doubt that the average American student is doing nearly enough writing to actually become skilled at it.

Well written stuff is kind of worthless. Few have something to say. I’ve read walls of text with no grammar that are worth more than many books (possibly combined (impossibly?)).

Just like programming, I wish more would write less.

If you study writing, then my expectation is that you should write well about writing. Nothing else.

A major problem is that the #1 criteria for acceptance of an essay is length.

Don't say in 10 words that can be said in 20. Don't make lists, don't make headings, don't make tables. Everything must be long flat paragraphs with nothing to stand out.

Can't it? Is there any reason to think Americans are worst at writing then any other nation?

Nobody reads any more. Tiktok and other SM is the rule. Most of the stuff I read is clickbait I regret. I dont think I can even sit down and comprehend a multi page article any more.

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