What Student Writing Teaches Us

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What’s great about the Overmeyer book for me is the real concrete advice on how to keep track of your thoughts and notes on student progress.The analogies to dancing and athletics are also right on. Writing is one of those things that you have to do badly before you do it well. There’s no way around that. So how can you give students a poor grade when the act of creating flawed writing is the only way to get the student to produce better writing?

Overmeyer’s tips for talking to students about writing, his advice on allowing students to participate in the creating of rubrics and his charts for keeping track of student progress all seem like things that can really be used in the classroom. It’s not theory.

One of my favorite things in this book is the Writing Checklist on page 33. It’s straightforward and boils writing down into something so simple, yet not simplified.

Another thing that really helped me about this book is seeing the actual student writing along with Overmeyer’s assessment of it. There were a few pieces where my first thought was, “I wouldn’t know where to start assessing this.” But Overmeyer was able to find the places where the student was doing well even if the student’s mechanics were extremely problematic. He was able to see that a student like Owen, who wrote about Brussels sprouts, was strong on detail and main idea even if his organization and mechanics needed help. So now I feel I’ll be better able to see past problems, especially on the mechanics side, and look for what is working in student writing. This was a hugely helpful book.

Another issue this book made me think about is this notion that students should write without any help whatsoever. Where on earth did this idea come from? I was a professional writer and editor for 14 years and I never wrote or edited a piece that went straight from the writer to publication without someone else stepping in and advising and changing/improving the piece first. Professional writers refer to a dictionary, a thesaurus, a style and usage manual ALL THE TIME! We consult with coworkers when we’re stuck. Reading about teachers discounting students’ accomplishments because they used a word they saw on the word wall instead of having it pop like magic out of their own brain is so incredibly ridiculous. I think this attitude toward education comes from a time when the goal of education was not to educate all kids but to weed out only those who are considered “exceptional” and throw the rest to the curb. Except “exceptional” generally meant, “just like us—the ruling class.” If that is no longer the purpose of education, then why do we still use these outdated notions toward writing. I have to admit, the writing prompts that Overmeyer mentions really freaked me out, because I don’t know if I could read that prompt and just start writing on that topic. I don’t know if I would do very well on these writing tests, although I’m pretty sure I’m a decent writer.

And another thing on punctuation. It is extraordinarily difficult to find errors in your own work, because you are so close to the content. You’ve read it so many times that you become blind to basic things that a fresh set of eyes will see right away. This is why we used to pay proofreaders in professional publishing. Now, we just accept lower quality and lots of errors. Because even an editor (as opposed to a proofreader who is only looking for mechanics and punctuation, not content) can overlook things once they get into the act of reworking sentences and what not. It’s just crazy to me to think that a student shouldn’t use tools, like reference books and peers, to improve their writing. Professional writers couldn’t work without them. Why should students?

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