After two decades of teaching college Freshman how to write, I sometimes think I'm just beginning to learn what to do -- or at least what the real problems are. My intention, on this page, is simply to share some observations, often questions, which other writing instructors may find of interest.

Are Students' Problems with Organization Really Problems with Organization?

     Why students have so much trouble with anything other than simple narrative organization has always troubled me. Many years ago, I thought that Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy explained much of the problem. Ong demonstrates, among other things, that oral cultures are essentially narrative. Hence, I concluded that oral students would have problems with the hypotaxis that is, as Ong suggests, characteristic of "literacy." The problem, as I saw it, involved the entire cultural mind-set of many of our students. Mind-sets are not easily changed.
      Today, however, in grading a few students' essays, I noted something which is probably obvious once seen, but is new and exciting to me. For many students, the problem may not be in organization at all. Rather, it is in their misunderstanding of the importance of details and examples. In one paper, for example, a student was trying to explain how working at a daycare center is emotionally rewarding. The essay, however, included not a single example of a person working with a child doing something which resulted in an emotional reward. Without such examples, students have nothing with which to fill a paragraph. In their attempts to reach the six-eight sentence paragraph length (a concept much easier to understand than is "details"), they simply pile topic sentence upon topic sentence, generalization upon generalization. Perhaps, for many students, the problem is not with organizing per se, but rather with understanding what it is that needs to be organized?
      Sept. 23, 1997