Title: Why They Can't Write Pdf Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities
Author: John Warner
Published Date: 2018-12-03
Page: 288
"An engaging, compelling, and ambitious book. Warner writes extremely well, and his main claims, driven by his expertise as both a writer and a teacher of writing, are solid and nuanced. An excellent addition to courses and programs in which future professors are being taught to teach, Why They Can't Write should be widely read.""If we really want to inspire young people to write, the tyranny of the five-paragraph essay must first be eradicated. John Warner has decades of experience turning reluctant writers into proficient and empowered ones. Wise writers, teachers, and rhetoricians will listen to this Illinoisian preach.""Why They Can’t Write offers a powerful diagnosis of what’s wrong with how we teach students to write and what we expect that writing to look like―the dreaded 'five paragraph essay,' for starters. But as Warner makes clear, the future of writing instruction doesn’t demand more efficient teaching machines to assess students’ vocabulary and punctuation. Rather, Warner calls for more meaningful writing experiences for students―experiences that encourage inquiry and recognize students’ (and teachers’) humanity.""John Warner’s Why They Can’t Write offers us a plethora of insights into what has derailed education and provides invaluable suggestions for how we can set it back on track again. Where to start? Get rid of the five-paragraph essay and any other formulaic approaches that train students to be bland, passionless writers and thinkers who score points on college entrance exams through pretention, not clarity. Plethora? Why They Can’t Write is common sense, which is to say it is revolutionary. Read it!""From the classic five paragraph essay to standardized writing and techno-hype, Warner has traced the many paths that intersect in our current Land of Bad Writing Instruction. Fortunately, he has mapped an escape route as well. An invaluable book for anyone who cares about creating and nurturing lifetime writers in the classroom.""In this profound-yet-practical, compassionate, funny, and learned book, brilliant teacher-writer-editor John Warner takes on multiple forms of 'folklore'―not just about writing and genres, but also about teaching and learning. Warner, who hones his own writing practice at Inside Higher Ed, laments the ways imitation writing, imitation learning, and... dare I say... imitation living result from harmful teaching. Business as usual: beware! Your days are numbered.""Why They Can't Write is a much-needed guide for all who are concerned about students' ability to write: teachers, parents, employers, and policymakers. Warner offers a concise, comprehensive assessment of the flawed policies that have handicapped writing instruction, and lays out a new map to guide our teaching. The book's engaging mix of research, practical experience, and common sense makes it a valuable resource for anyone who cares about good writing and good teaching.""John Warner invites you to rethink everything you have learned about education, and writing in particular. Accept that invitation. Anyone who teaches writing will finish this book―written in the author's characteristically personable prose―with the foundations for a new approach to education, along with plenty of concrete ideas for engaging new writing assignments for their students.""That title sounds as if it will be a grumpy polemic, but it's actually an inspiring exploration of what learning to write could be, framed by an analysis of why it so often is soul-destroying for both students and their teachers.""Articulates a set of humanist values that could generate rich new classroom practices and, one hopes, encourage teachers, parents, and policymakers to rethink the whole idea of School and why it matters to a society. Warner is pragmatic, not programmatic, and hopeful without being naïve... I hope teachers, parents, and administrators across the United States read his trenchant book. We are the reformers we have been waiting for."John Warner is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, a contributing blogger for Inside Higher Education, and an editor at large for McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He is the author or coeditor of seven books.
There seems to be widespread agreement that―when it comes to the writing skills of college students―we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.
Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules―such as the five-paragraph essay―designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments.
In Why They Can't Write, Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of strong writers.
This is THE book I will recommend to all my students who want to become teachers I am so grateful to John Warner for writing this book! I have a career trajectory very similar to John's (a 20-year member of the writing instructor precariat), and I've always wanted to write a book to share what I've learned over that time -- but now, I don't have to: John has written the book we all need! It is an excellent balance of analysis (with crucial background information about has been happening with high school writing over the past several decades), practical advice (John shares some fantastic writing exercises that he uses with his students), and also big-picture commentary on the college writing scene (especially the increasing use of lecturers, adjuncts, and graduate students to teach writing classes). I've been a reader of John's column at Inside Higher Ed for years, so I had a good idea of the topics he would cover, and I am so impressed at how he was able to organize this wide range of material into a compelling presentation (just one example: I'm going to steal his stylistic trick of ending each chapter with a hook into the chapter that follows). I also really enjoyed the personal anecdotes about the very positive writing experiences he had as a student in elementary school, compared to the un-memorable writing experiences of his college undergraduate days (I suspect the same is true for many of us). John has shared many "mea culpa" mistakes that he made as he learned how to succeed in teaching undergraduate writers; they are many of the same mistakes I made myself (I wish I had been able to read this book 20 years ago when I started my college teaching career). By the time students get to college, many of them have learned to hate writing, and even to hate reading (ask them, and they'll tell you in soul-numbing detail just how school does that). The job we face as writing instructors can feel overwhelming. It's even harder for other college faculty who teach (and grade) student writing but don't really know how to help their students improve as writers; some faculty members are still struggling with their own fear and loathing of the writing process. So, if you feel stuck in your work as a writing instructor, read this book! If you are a college instructor in any subject who wants to learn how you can help your students with their writing, read this book! If you are the parent of a college student who struggles with writing, read this book! If you are a college student and you want to teach yourself how to become a better writer, read this book! I know I will be starting next semester with a renewed sense of hope and purpose in my work thanks to reading this book. Towards the end of the book John describes his dream that a mythical "Zuckergates" might read his book and start making better investments in education. My dream is this: colleges should buy a copy of this book for every new faculty member. Such an investment would benefit all our students and boost the writing culture of academia in general.A great book for training thoughtful & deliberate writers Warner is a composition instructor with decades of teaching under his belt. Like me, he was trained in & rewarded for writing in a certain academic way, for teaching students to write in a certain academic way. The opening half of the book is a withering critique of writing programs that lean too heavily on the traditional thesis-driven essay. The remaining half is a vision for how to create voice & choice for students. Thanks to Warner, I’ve had great success focusing writing projects on four things. First, ask the student to identify a problem they’d like to solve that this text addresses; second, instruct the student to be as precise as possible about the audience that the student will target in terms of rhetorical tone; third, have the student aim to culminate in a lesson or discovery that is purposeful (for who you are personally, for where your school is this year, etc.); and fourth, have the student make clear from the beginning two writing style challenges that they’d like to tackle.I don't know which of the 5,300 colleges or universities my students will attend--and that's just counting in the USA. I have no idea what kind of professional lives they will lead. As a result, I must stop presuming that they will *all* do any *single* kind of writing. Instead, I will prepare them to write with voice, to write to an audience, and to write with purpose and problem-solving diligence. This book helps you do that.Problem? Agreed. While I agree with Warner's premise that students have trouble with research projects, his solution to throw out the concept (because they won't need to write them in the real world anyway?!) seems unrealistic. I think if our students all were enrolled in academia in order to write nothing but personal narratives, this idea would suffice. However, students routinely must compose non-fiction pieces about concepts they are (gasp!) still learning. After all, that's the point of college: to learn.I simply cannot condone the idea that writing instructors should become primarily wordsmith teachers, pouring over essays to find that spark of creative flair. Instead, I argue that we need to dig into the truly difficult work of teaching how to research, how to read and understand the academic sources, how to design and articulate an argument, and how to interact with and respond to these texts in coherent ways. Warner is right: that can't be done quickly or students WILL revert to techniques they know. At the end of this rigorous process, we must ask if the student failed to learn or the teacher failed to teach? Both? Neither?I did appreciate his chapters outlining the difficulty of high schoolers and their teachers. I thought his ideas for writing projects might serve in the high school or developmental level and be quite effective.
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