Too often, our school system assumes that once students graduate from high school or college – or even middle school – they’ll be able to “write in general”. The predominant idea is that general education leads to general skills and abilities. Rather, our education system at present teaches students to write five-paragraph argumentative and persuasive essays…usually based on some text that was covered in class. Beyond that, ask a student to write a manuscript or type up financial documents or some other arbitrary third thing and chances are, they won’t be able to do it. Now, why is that? In her piece so aptly titled You Can’t Teach “Writing in General”, Elizabeth Wardle argues that learning to write is an ongoing and never-ending process. The key idea is specialization. For every piece of literature that someone writes, there is a purpose or audience in mind. That audience has specific expectations of what the piece should include or that piece should accomplish a specific task. The danger of believing that writing can be taught in the “general” sense is that it leads to widespread frustration from students to educators to employers and everyone in between. Specialized writing is the only true form of writing!
Serving as a nice companion piece, Catherine Savini’s Looking for Trouble: Finding Your Way into a Writing Assignment gives helpful writing tips for students who may occasionally get stumped on how to begin an assignment or how to tackle the tasks at hand. Savini encourages students to focus on finding the “problem”. If a particular component of the assignment is causing students to have a problem or the reading confuses them, the best thing to do is to start asking questions. By focusing on the problem and asking why something might be a particular way, one might find that the answer and, by extension, a potential thesis were sitting in front of them the entire time.
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