Writing in school is supposed to do a lot of lofty things: help us become well-rounded, help us communicate, and help us organize our ideas – but does it really do those things?
To look into this myth we’re going to try to break down how writing is used in schools and what makes that problematic for students learning anything.
First and foremost, to learn to write well you have to practice. And by practice we don’t mean write the same types of texts over and over, we mean work with all sorts of variables and practice different writing styles in order to sharpen your writing across the board.
Think of it like training for sports. When you’re in the gym you don’t just do one exercise at one weight until it’s easy, you challenge yourself with different exercises and different intensities to mix things up and keep improving by overcoming challenges.
That’s pretty much the case for writing too. We get better by facing fresh challenges that make us think and use different approaches.
Writing in school is a lot more like training one exercise than a good balanced workout. In school, writing is taught more for the sake of it being tested than for actually learning good writing practices. So that puts us in a dangerous place: we aren’t taught taught to develop strong writing practices, we’re taught to successfully become a statistic on some standardized test.
When we're asked to think in the same ways, respond to the same questions, and organize our thoughts according to the same patterns, we are at risk of our writing becoming habitual or automatic.
This sounds like it should be a good thing, right? It’s easy to confuse mastery with automaticity; when our practices become automatic so do our shortcomings. Scientists, for example are notoriously bad at communicating ideas and findings to the public because they’re so accustomed to writing to the same audience of other scientists.
This is another one of the problems with writing in schools. All writing has an audience even if it’s only the person who wrote it – like a diary. In school our writing loses focus on audiences when we only write papers with a teacher or invisible grader as our audience.
Having to think about various audiences and what it takes to communicate with them is what writing is all about and, in that regard, school often leaves us to sink or swim.
The habitual writing rut is why so many students struggle to connect the writing they’ve done in mandatory English classes to their work or major.
You’ve mostly been taught one kind of writing and none of the flexibility you need to get by when every field writes differently.
As we try to apply the writing skills we’ve developed in school, we often find that we bring old mistakes into new situations. With that we can say that this myth is very plausible. For a lot of us the writing we do in school doesn’t make us better writers except at the one kind we’re taught.
