Tips for Parents: What is Academic Writing?

Writing is thinking. If you're not writing clearly, you're not thinking clearly. People cannot think without language, let alone communicate with others. There's no other way to teach "higher order thinking skills" or "critical thinking skills" than to ask students to write analytical responses to rich questions--not narrative or poetry. Like dieters looking for a magic pill, the educational system has tried and will try everything before doing what works.

Most of what is being explicitly taught about writing in schools focuses on the creative aspects of writing fiction or poetry; relatively little focus is put on the types of non-fiction academic writing that students will need to succeed in life and school, like the six non-fiction text structures, sentence (idea) combining, and transition words and phrases. My clients have never asked me to write a story about the results of a workshop. The IRS has consistently rejected my poems about why I need a payment plan.

If this focus on narrative, creative writing sounds illogical, that's because it is. The system focuses on writing as a creative art (as fiction is), rather than a learned, structured skill (as non-fiction is). Elementary school teachers explicitly teach narrative, descriptive writing and then hope that the students intuit how to transfer those skills to write clear, concise analytical responses to complex questions in secondary school. Parents are left to wonder why their children are not able to analyze and synthesize information. Many a parent whose children I work with confide that they are worried because their children write nonsense, that their thinking is superficial and simple. And it is, because they have never been taught any differently.

I can't tell you how many times I've had secondary teachers say to me, "These kids can't write!" Well, that is why they are in school, isn't it? To learn? Or students say to me "I know it, but I just can't explain it." Guess what? There's no such thing as knowing something without being able to explain it. That Emperor is buck naked and it's about time somebody noticed! Clarity of thinking doesn't happen accidentally. We forget that writing is nothing more than thinking made visible. To follow an other's thinking, communication needs to be logically organized and effectively communicated. How to do it needs to be taught, explicitly and systematically in every subject. There is no substitute, no magic pill that will make it happen without actual writing.

Middle and high school teachers often say to me, "I don't teach writing, I teach science (or social studies, or math). However, every teachers teaches thinking--or should do. While non-language arts secondary teachers may not teach grammar, usage, mechanics, and style, they need to teach students how to think and express complex ideas and information in their discipline--using the organizational structures and technical vocabulary most useful to that discipline.

So parents--ask your children's schools and teachers for more non-fiction, analytical writing across all subject areas. Ask when they will do it, why aren't they doing more of it, and what kinds of writing they are doing instead.