<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><b class="" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Three-quarters</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;" class=""><b class=""> of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing</b>, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to successfully complete a college-level English composition class, according to the company’s data...</span><b class="" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> The root of the problem, educators agree, is that teachers have little training in how to teach writing and are often weak or unconfident writers themselves.</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;" class=""> </span></p><div class=""><br class=""></div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><font size="5" class=""><i class="">New York Times</i></font></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 14px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 238);" class=""><span style="text-decoration: underline ; font-kerning: none" class=""><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/pages/education/edlife/index.html" class=""><b class="">Education Life</b></a></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><b class=""> </b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 14.9px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">A Wakeup Call on Writing Instruction (Now, What’s an Adverb?)</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">By <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/dana-goldstein" class=""><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: rgb(2, 30, 170); -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 238);" class="">DANA GOLDSTEIN</span></a> AUGUST 2, 2017 </span></p><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 16px;" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""></span><br class=""></div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">On a bright July morning in a windowless conference room in a Manhattan bookstore, several dozen elementary school teachers were learning how to create worksheets that would help children learn to write.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Judith C. Hochman, founder of an organization called the <b class="">Writing Revolution</b>, displayed examples of student work. A first grader had produced the following phrase: “Plants need water it need sun to”—that is, plants need water and sun, too. If the student didn’t learn how to correct pronoun disagreement and missing conjunctions, by high school he could be writing phrases like this one: “Well Machines are good but they take people jobs like if they don’t know how to use it they get fired.” That was a real submission on the essay section of the ACT.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">“It all starts with a sentence,” Dr. Hochman said.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Focusing on the fundamentals of grammar is one approach to teaching writing. But it’s by no means the dominant one. Many educators are concerned less with sentence-level mechanics than with helping students draw inspiration from their own lives and from literature.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Thirty miles away at Nassau Community College, Meredith Wanzer, a high school teacher and instructor with the Long Island Writing Project, was running a weeklong workshop attended by six teenage girls. The goal was to prepare them to write winning college admissions essays—that delicate genre calling for a student to highlight her strengths (without sounding boastful) and tell a vivid personal story (without coming off as self-involved).</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Ms. Wanzer led the students in a freewrite, a popular English class strategy of writing without stopping or judging. First, she read aloud from “Bird by Bird,” Anne Lamott’s 1995 <b class="">classic on how to write with voice</b>. “You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind,” the memoirist writes. <b class="">“Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.”</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Ms. Wanzer then asked the students to<b class=""> spend a few minutes writing anything they liked </b>in response to the Lamott excerpt. Lyse Armand, a rising senior at Westbury High School, leaned over her notebook. She was planning to apply to New York University, Columbia and Stony Brook University and already had an idea of the story she would tell in her Common Application essay. It would have something to do, she thought, with her family’s emigration from Haiti following the 2010 earthquake that devastated the island. But she was struggling with how to get started and what exactly she wanted to say.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">“What voice in my head?” she wrote in her response to the Lamott essay. “I don’t have one.”</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Lyse needed a sense of “ownership” over her writing, Ms. Wanzer said. Lyse had solid sentence-level skills. But even when Ms. Wanzer encounters juniors and seniors whose essays are filled with incomplete sentences—not an uncommon occurrence—she limits the time she spends covering dull topics like subject-verb agreement. “You hope that by exposing them to great writing, they’ll start to hear what’s going on.”</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to successfully complete a college-level English composition class, according to the company’s data.</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Poor writing is nothing new, nor is concern about it. More than half of first-year students at Harvard failed an entrance exam in writing—in 1874. But the Common Core State Standards, now in use in more than two-thirds of the states, were supposed to change all this. <b class="">By requiring students to learn three types of essay writing— argumentative, informational and narrative—the Core staked a claim for writing as central to the American curriculum.</b> It represented a sea change after the era of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law that largely overlooked writing in favor of reading comprehension assessed by standardized multiple-choice tests.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">So far, however, six years after its rollout, the Core hasn’t led to much measurable improvement on the page. <b class="">Students continue to arrive on college campuses needing remediation in basic writing skills.</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">The root of the problem, educators agree, is that teachers have little training in how to teach writing and are often weak or unconfident writers themselves. </b>According to Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a scan of course syllabuses from 2,400 teacher preparation programs turned up <b class="">little evidence that the teaching of writing was being covered in a widespread or systematic way.</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">A separate 2016 study of nearly 500 teachers in grades three through eight across the country, conducted by Gary Troia of Michigan State University and Steve Graham of Arizona State University, found that <b class="">fewer than half had taken a college class that devoted significant time to the teaching of writing,</b> while fewer than a third had taken a class solely devoted to how children learn to write. Unsurprisingly, given their lack of preparation, only 55 percent of respondents said they enjoyed teaching the subject.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">“Most teachers are great readers,” Dr. Troia said. “They’ve been successful in college, maybe even graduate school. <b class="">But when you ask most teachers about their comfort with writing and their writing experiences, they don’t do very much or feel comfortable with it.”</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">There is virulent debate about what approach is best. So-called “process writing,” like the lesson Lyse experienced in Long Island, emphasizes activities like brainstorming, freewriting, journaling about one’s personal experiences and peer-to-peer revision. Adherents worry that focusing too much on grammar or citing sources will stifle the writerly voice and prevent children from falling in love with writing as an activity.</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">That ideology goes back to the 1930s, when progressive educators began to shift the writing curriculum away from penmanship and spelling and toward diary entries and personal letters as a psychologically liberating activity.</b> Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, this movement took on the language of civil rights, with teachers striving to empower nonwhite and poor children by encouraging them to narrate their own lived experiences.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Dr. Hochman’s strategy is radically different: a return to the basics of sentence construction, from combining fragments to fixing punctuation errors to learning how to deploy the powerful conjunctive adverbs that are common in academic writing but uncommon in speech, words like “therefore” and “nevertheless.” After all, the Snapchat generation may produce more writing than any group of teenagers before it, writing copious text messages and social media posts, <b class="">but when it comes to the formal writing </b>expected at school and work, they struggle with the mechanics of simple sentences.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">The Common Core has provided a much-needed “wakeup call” on the importance of rigorous writing, said Lucy M. Calkins, founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University, a leading center for training teachers in process-oriented literacy strategies. But policy makers “blew it in the implementation,” she said. <b class="">“We need massive teacher education.”</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">One of the largest efforts is the National Writing Project, whose nearly 200 branches train more than 100,000 teachers each summer. The organization was founded in 1974, at the height of the process-oriented era.</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">As part of its program at Nassau Community College, in a classroom not far from the one where the teenagers were working on their college essays, a group of teachers—of fifth grade and high school, of English, social studies and science—were <b class="">honing their own writing skills</b>. They took turns reading out loud the freewriting they had just done in response to “The Lanyard,” a poem by Billy Collins. The poem, which is funny and sad, addresses the futility of trying to repay one’s mother for her love:</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><i class="">Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered, and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.</i></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Most of the teachers’ responses pivoted quickly from praising the poem to memories of their own mothers, working several jobs to make ends meet, or selflessly caring for grandchildren. It wasn’t sophisticated literary criticism, but that wasn’t the point. A major goal of this workshop—the teacher-training component of the Long Island Writing Project—<b class="">was to get teachers writing and revising their own work over the summer so that in the fall they would be more enthusiastic and comfortable teaching the subject to children.</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">“I went to Catholic school and we did grammar workbooks and circled the subject and predicate,” said Kathleen Sokolowski, the Long Island program’s co-director and a third-grade teacher. She found it stultifying and believes she developed her writing skill in spite of such lessons, not because of them.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Sometimes, she said, she will reinforce grammar by asking students to copy down a sentence from a favorite book and then discuss how the author uses a tool like commas. But in general, when it comes to assessing student work, she said, “I had to teach myself to look beyond ‘There’s no capital, there’s no period’ to say, ‘By God, you wrote a gorgeous sentence.’ ”</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Mrs. Sokolowski is right that formal grammar instruction, like identifying parts of speech, doesn’t work well. In fact, research finds that students exposed to a glut of such instruction perform worse on writing assessments.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">A musical notion of writing—the hope that the ear can be trained to “hear” errors and imitate quality prose—has developed as a popular alternative among English teachers. But what about those students, typically low income, with few books at home, who struggle to move from reading a gorgeous sentence to knowing how to write one? Could there be a better, less soul-crushing way to enforce the basics?</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">In her teacher training sessions, Dr. Hochman of the Writing Revolution shows a slide of a cute little girl, lying contentedly on her stomach as she scrawls on a piece of composition paper. It’s the type of stock photograph that has probably appeared in a hundred educators’ PowerPoint presentations, meant to evoke a warm and relaxed learning environment, perhaps in one of the cozy writing nooks favored by the process-oriented writing gurus.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">“This is not good writing posture!” Dr. Hochman exclaimed. Small children should write at desks, she believes. And while she isn’t arguing for a return to the grammar lessons of yesteryear—she knows sentence diagramming leaves most students confused and disengaged—she does believe that children should spend time filling out worksheets with exercises like the one below, which demonstrates how simple conjunctions like “but,” “because” and “so” add complexity to a thought. Students are given the root clause, and must complete the sentence with a new clause following each conjunction:</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Fractions are like decimals because <i class="">they are all parts of wholes</i>.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Fractions are like decimals, but <i class="">they are written differently</i>.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Fractions are like decimals, so <i class="">they can be used interchangeably</i>.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Along the way, students are learning to recall meaningful content from math, social studies, science and literature. By middle school, teachers should be crafting essay questions that prompt <b class="">sophisticated writing; not “What were the events leading up to the Civil War?”—which could result in a list—but “Trace the events leading up to the Civil War,” which requires a historical narrative of cause and effect.</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">“Freewriting, hoping that children will learn or gain a love of writing, hasn’t worked</b>,” Dr. Hochman told the teachers, many of whom work in low-income neighborhoods. She doesn’t believe that children learn to write well through plumbing their own experiences in a journal, and she applauds the fact that the Common Core asks students to do <b class="">more writing about what they’ve read, and less about their own lives.</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">“I call it a move away from child-centered writing,” she said approvingly, and away from what she considers facile assignments, like writing a poem “about a particular something they may have observed 10 minutes ago out of the window.”</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">“I don’t mean to be dismissive,” she continued, “but every instructional minute has its purpose.”</span></p><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Kathleen Sokolowski leads a workshop for teachers that focuses on narrative skills, part of the Long Island Writing Project. Her training session lacks the fun and interactivity of the Long Island Writing Project, because it is less about prompting teachers to write and chat with colleagues and more about the sometimes dry work of preparing worksheets and writing assignments that reinforce basic concepts. Nevertheless, many teachers who learn Dr. Hochman’s strategies become devotees.</span></div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 16px;" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""></span><br class=""></div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Molly Cudahy, who teaches fifth-grade special education at the Truesdell Education Campus, a public school in Washington, D.C., said she appreciates Dr. Hochman’s explicit and technical approach. She thought it would free her students’ voices, not constrain them. At her school, 100 percent of students come from low-income families. <b class="">“When we try to do creative and journal writing,” she said, “students don’t have the tools to put their ideas on paper.”</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">There is a notable shortage of high-quality research on the teaching of writing,</b> but studies that do exist point toward a few concrete strategies that help students perform better on writing tests. First, children need to learn how to transcribe both by hand and through typing on a computer. Teachers report that many students who can produce reams of text on their cellphones are unable to work effectively at a laptop, desktop or even in a paper notebook because they’ve become so anchored to the small mobile screen. Quick communication on a smartphone almost requires writers to eschew rules of grammar and punctuation, exactly the opposite of what is wanted on the page.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Before writing paragraphs—which is often now part of the kindergarten curriculum— children do need to practice writing great sentences. At every level, students benefit from clear feedback on their writing, and from seeing and trying to imitate what successful writing looks like, the so-called text models. Some of the touchy-feel stuff matters, too. Students with higher confidence in their writing ability perform better.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">All of this points toward a synthesis of the two approaches. In classrooms where practices like freewriting are used without any focus on transcription or punctuation, “the students who struggled didn’t make any progress,” Dr. Troia, the Michigan State professor, said. But when grammar instruction is divorced from the writing process and from rich ideas in literature or science, it becomes “superficial,” he warned.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">Considering the lack of adequate teacher training, Lyse may be among a minority of students exposed to explicit instruction about writing.</b></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">In Ms. Wanzer’s workshop, Lyse and her classmates went on to analyze real students’ <b class="">college essays</b> to determine their strengths and weaknesses. They also read “Where I’m From,” a poem by George Ella Lyon, and used it as a text model for their work. Lyse drafted her own version of “Where I’m From,” which helped her recall details from her childhood in Haiti.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Lyse wrote: “I am from the rusty little tin roof house, from washing by hand and line drying.” It was a gorgeous sentence, and she was well on her way to a moving college application essay.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 16px;" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""></span><br class=""></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Dana Goldstein is an education reporter for <i class="">The Times</i>.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">A version of this article appears in print on August 6, 2017, on Page ED8 of Education Life with the headline: <i class="">Why Kids Can’t Write</i>. <a href="http://www.nytreprints.com/" class=""><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: rgb(2, 30, 170); -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 238);" class="">Order Reprints</span></a>| <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/pages/todayspaper/index.html" class=""><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: rgb(2, 30, 170); -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 238);" class="">Today's Paper</span></a>|<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp839RF.html?campaignId=48JQY" class=""><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: rgb(2, 30, 170); -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 238);" class="">Subscribe</span></a> </span></p><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; color: rgb(2, 30, 170); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 238);" class=""><span style="text-decoration: underline ; font-kerning: none" class=""><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/education/edlife/writing-education-grammar-students-children.html#whats-next" class="">Continue reading the main story</a></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""> </span></div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 16px;" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""></span><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 16px;" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""></span><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 16px;" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""></span><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 16px;" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""></span><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 16px;" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""></span><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 16px;" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""></span><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 16px;" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""></span><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 16px;" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""></span><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 16px;" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""></span><br class=""></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>