College writing assignments: what to expect. (X-post to College and K-8)

[Tullia]

KarenAnne suggested the following in another thread about WTM writing:

 

This would be an interesting question to pose on another thread: what kinds of writing do your college students find themselves most often asked to do? How do writing expectations change across subject disciplines? What kind of writing is the hardest for undergraduates to do? How often do they use the process of invention, drafting, revising, and the like?

 

I'd add to that a suggestion that we as parent teachers begin thinking fairly early about ultimate goals. Our family's primary goal was acquiring skills for college level writing, but we also went beyond with the ultimate goal of understanding that there is a writing life after college too. :)

 

I'm looking forward to hearing more about what others have found. My son's college experience is still fairly limited, but here's a summary of what he's seen so far:

 

1. None of his college writing assignments have fit neatly into any of the categories of essays we studied. However, he has used some of those arrangements in responses to in-class essay exams.

 

2. Even so, teaching those forms as well as using a classical paradigm for teaching writing has been valuable, because knowing the theory and having practiced foundational skills such as invention, drafting, editing, revising means that seeing unfamiliar or unusual arrangement schemes isn't a problem.

 

3. Even though he's not been asked to write a persuasive essay, the skills learned in writing them such as invention strategies and checking for logical consistency have been important.

 

4. With regard to research paper skills, the two most important things to learn from that process, IMO, are (1) learning to manage a sustained effort with increasingly complex assignments and (2) learning how to efficiently narrow the scope of a paper within the guidelines of a particular assignment. SWB's guidelines for writing research papers were accurate indicators of the requirements for the research paper my son wrote in his English course last fall. No surprise there! :D

[Susan C.]

Martha,

I worried myself sick about preparing my kids for college. Now that I have one in college, I will let up.... ds is an English major. The papers he is writing now (and he had full instruction at college for them), he couldn't write in high school. There is a higher level of analysis in college that most high schoolers are not ready for. My next one, dd, I will take her as far as she can go, and let the college take it from there.

 

As far as format, ds tells me that that is open, as long as the paper has a thesis, it is not deviated from, and there is a conclusion. Literally everything else is open, including format. In the upper level papers, that can change to suit what is written about.

 

I won't let my high schooler know too much about that...LOL, but her papers are not to a strict format, and ds says his professors would have liked them.

[Tullia]

Martha,

I worried myself sick about preparing my kids for college. Now that I have one in college, I will let up.... ds is an English major. The papers he is writing now (and he had full instruction at college for them), he couldn't write in high school. There is a higher level of analysis in college that most high schoolers are not ready for. My next one, dd, I will take her as far as she can go, and let the college take it from there. Excellent point; if I had another student coming along I'd be thinking the same way.

 

As far as format, ds tells me that that is open, as long as the paper has a thesis, it is not deviated from, and there is a conclusion. Literally everything else is open, including format. In the upper level papers, that can change to suit what is written about.

 

I won't let my high schooler know too much about that...LOL, but her papers are not to a strict format, and ds says his professors would have liked them.

 

Yep, it's easy to worry about college and probably not a good use of time. ITA with you on expectations about the level of analysis it's reasonable to expect from high school students. When I pulled out my son's writing and compared 8th grade work to 10th grade work it was obvious that he'd made gains. My problem was that in 9th grade it was sometimes hard to see progress--and that made me nervous. I've seen a similar jump from high school to college writing and had similar worries in the interim. Guess I must enjoy worrying! We did not do as much work on research papers in high school as I'd have liked, but my son did have the basics and he's doing fine. And, as you mentioned, there is quite a bit of writing instruction offered as part of the coursework in the college classroom.

[Guest]

If anyone is interested, I can dig out some of the essay topics I assigned for undergraduate literature courses. The last course I taught was around five or six years ago, but I taught for just about a dozen years before that. I can post them, assuming that is okay with forum rules, or PM me your regular e-mail and I'll attach them to a reply.

 

I totally agree with Martha about two things: first, that there is writing life beyond college, both professional and personal writing lives in which many more possibilities for form and approach open up; and second, that college essays generally are not as tidily divided into formal structures or types as in TWTM.

Edited May 27, 2010 by Guest

[Photo Ninja]

My dc have had to do different types of writing in college. In English courses they have done literature analysis and persuasive writing. They have not had to do any research papers yet, but have had to do projects that included a writing component based on their research and presentation. One ds has had to write a fictional story based on a Greek myth, mostly taking a myth and changing the characters and setting to modern day, mirroring the basic story in modern terms. History papers have been primarily comparative or persuasive.

 

One thing my dc found invaluable was our focus on writing timed essays in high school. Most of their college English, history, Sociology and Psychology tests have had an in class essay component, so being able to write an organized, content-heavy essay in one hour is important.

[LoriM]

My dds have primarily been asked to do research-based writing in their courses, and that means cranking out a MLA-formatted paper in a timely manner while juggling other coursework. They tell me that the best prep they had was the twice-weekly 45-minute essays we did throughout high school using my own weird method (LOL) and then the ENG113 course they took at the CC that taught the MLA particulars.