"I didn't know you knew so much about writing"

A few days ago my husband and I were hanging out with a friend who asked us to look over a proposal he was writing. It seemed well-structured, but we went thru it line by line for style and grammar issues. After we got home, my husband said to me, "I didn't know you knew so much about writing."

Of course, he knows that I'm getting my master's in writing and that I teach writing. And I've read over his essays since before we were dating. I had no grand insights about our friend's proposal. I helped him revise a list to have parallel structure (which is complicated if one is a bit hazy on what constitutes a noun).

I might think that it was a handle on the "rules" of writing that caused my husband to observe that I knew stuff. But when I suggest guidelines for use in his own essays, he usually points out successful writers who don't follow the rules. Perhaps "rules" seem like knowledge--so long as someone else has to follow them.

I'm a Grade Inflator

Looking over my students' final grades, I see clearly that they're inflated. Most students are a full letter grade higher than what I feel they should be. I gave them too high of grades on their papers, and now they have too high of grades for the class.

I know I set the bar lower this semester than last semester, because I just wasn't getting the quality I hoped for. There were a few excellent papers, but a lot of C and D quality work that I gave B's and C's instead. I wanted to encourage them. I hate giving a D to a paper that looks like someone worked hard on. I hate giving a C when the paper has no obvious defects other than being really boring. And I hate not having a single paper in the stack which clearly deserves an A.

I try to be positive when I grade. I try not to concentrate on little things like punctuation or awkward wording. I look for that excellent paper that I can honestly enjoy reading. And I don't always find it.

I guess, in the end, the important question is How does grade inflation affect my students? Does getting an A or B in my class make them think they don't need to keep working on their writing? I don't think so, because many of my students' reflective essays commented on how this class made them realize they weren't quite as good as they thought they were. Hopefully the comments and conferences made as much impact as the actual grades, so that even if they think they're pretty good writers already, they have some idea of their strengths and weaknesses in the future. If they continue taking courses which force them to write, hopefully the practice will help them improve. Hopefully even if they didn't master all the skills from my course that I'd hoped they would, when a professor writes "choppy" on a paper in their future, they might vaguely remember that that one teacher said "choppy" means to connect your sentences with words like "although," "because," and "for example." And so writing will at least be conquerable if not conquered.

Why Is It Easy for Me but Not Them?

I really just don't get it. I don't get why a B student would plagiarize 90% of his paper, even after participating in both workshops. Inadequate paraphrase is one thing. I probably did it myself when I didn't realize it. But copying and pasting entire websites into your paper with only a few sentences actually in your own words? How is a B student that desperate? If you don't have time to do the work, can't you at least write something crappy and short in your own words? At least you'd pass the course then. I've turned in papers several pages under the minimum, turned in papers I felt were C or even D quality because I was tired of writing. But I'd never dream of fleshing out a paper with Ctrl+v.

Teaching and tutoring make me realize that writing was a lot easier for me than it was for a lot of people. In peer review workshops, I used to assume that the upperclassmen knew something I didn't, so if they didn't use much evidence to back up their claims, I actually thought I must have been overdoing it. I stopped using so much textual evidence. It never occurred to me that maybe I got better grades than they did.

I never had to be told not to "drop" quotations in without a signal phrase--at least, I never remember being told. Yet I find this is very difficult for many of my students and common among even upperclassmen in the writing center. I almost always rather easily grasped the goals of the assignment, whereas this is a major hangup for students in all majors visiting the writing center.

I want to get into people's heads, to be able to sympathize. I understand using imprecise pronouns or not being good at paragraphing, because I still work at those things. But there are some things that to me seem so obvious that I never thought of them as even needing to be taught. And I can teach them, but I can't sympathize. I can only go through the motions of explaining in a way that I hope will facilitate my students' understanding.