It's All in the Details

I was cleaning out my office at the end of the fall semester and came across a stack of final essays from my Development Writing students from a couple of years ago. We're obligated to keep graded work for at least one year after the end of a term just in case a student wants to come by and pick up work or in case there's a grade appeal and you need to supply additional evidence that the student didn't initially have access to. 

Developmental Writing essays are typically short, so I took a few minutes to read through them again before putting them in the recycling bin. The assignment was a simple one: the student had to evaluate a product or a place or some example of entertainment (a TV show, a movie, a song, etc.). As I told them on the assignment sheet, the key would be the details that they gave to support their assertions about the quality of what they chose to evaluate. Below are some examples of the details that they gave.

• "I have had many great moments there." (None of those great moments were described or mentioned.

• "My overall evaluation of this place is that it is a good park that has many cool features." (None of the park's particular features were listed or included.)

• "X is a medium sized restaurant where there are plenty of tables inside and a couple of tables outside for you to sit and eat. When you go inside they greet you by saying 'Welcome to X.' Once you order your sandwich you can see how they make it. You don’t have to get up and get your sandwich they will bring it to you." (I'm not sure that any of this is particularly unique in restaurants. Aren't these details common to lots of different restaurants?)

• "It’s mostly good." (How can I possibly not know what is meant by this assessment? It just says it all, doesn't it?)

• "There is mostly bad things about X but they are small things." (Those small things are never mentioned, just alluded to here. The writer only stuck to the good things.)

• "It’s mostly good, but there’s bad." (I did tell them that nothing is all good or all bad, and I suggested that they try to look at both the positive and the negative. I guess the student gave me what I asked for.)

• "They also have a numerous amount of drinks such as root beer, strawberry lemonade, ginger ale and peach tea just to name a few, to spice things up for the grown and sexy they have a fully equipped bar with a selection of hundreds of alcoholic beverages to choose from." (I'm dying to know what it means to be both "grown and sexy." I think I've been one or the other at times, but never both at once, so I don't think I can order from the bar in this place.)

One of the traits of developing writers that I most admire is their naivete at how others don't know what's inside their heads. They assume that most people have very similar experiences or backgrounds, so they don't explain what they think should be apparent to everyone else. It's one of the toughest jobs as a writing teacher to convince students that I and other readers don't actually know what they were thinking when they wrote down something, that I really do need more information, more details in order to understand.

It's one of the highlights for me as a teacher when students grow and improve in their use of details and examples, when they fully develop their ideas because they are truly considering that someone else is going to read what they've written. Don't take my sharing of these examples as anything more than my recognition that sometimes I do fail at achieving this goal. 

Where Do You Start?

As a writing teacher, sometimes I get sentences and paragraphs and even entire essays that are just so astonishing in their inability to convey information clearly that I have to save them and share them. The paragraph below, written for a developmental writing class, is the one that stood out this semester as the worst offender. The assignment was a relatively simple one. Students had to describe a place that held some special significance to them. I expected there to be not only physical description of this place but some attempt to explain why it was so significant, what sort of history they had with the places they chose.

I have preserved the sentence structure and the spelling and all other aspects of the original except for the line spacing (which had its own issues). This was the final draft's concluding paragraph. Yes, it is all just one sentence. I had written on the rough draft that the student should try to sum up, as best he could, why the place he had chosen to discuss meant so much to him.

"In conclusion, Angel Stadium means a lot me and it will always be a place of merit and it's a place that will always have importance to me and it will never be a place to I can hang out because of the memories that I have at the stadium and it will never leave my mind and the memories i have of game seven of the world series and it can be a good thing it can also be a bad thing but I see it as a good thing because it will always be in my mind and that is why it has merit and importance in my life."

I just couldn't think of what to tell the student about how to make that conclusion better. Unfortunately, he stopped coming to class at about the same time, so I never had a chance to return the graded paper and talk to him about how he might try to improve his writing skills. That means that someone--hopefully, someone more patient and talented than I am--will be helping him out in the same class next semester.