The One Method That Changes Your—and All Students’—Writing

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch, Pexels

I remember spending hours commenting painstakingly on my students’ papers when I was a graduate student teaching in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. My students loved our classes, and they filled my sections and gave me terrific course evaluations. Yet I could see that their writing failed to change significantly over the course of the semester. I ended up feeling as if I should refund their money, haunted by the blunt instruments we had to teach writing. 

As I’ve learned from directing five writing programs at three different universities, methods matter. When I reviewed comments on papers from instructors who taught in my programs, I discovered that the quantity and quality of comments on students’ papers made only a slight impact on writing outcomes. For instance, one notoriously lazy instructor took several weeks to return assignments and only used spelling and grammar checkers to automate comments. But his conscientious colleague made dozens of sharp observations about students’ arguments, paragraphs, and sentences. However, Mr. Conscientious’ students improved perhaps only 10% over Mr. Minimalist’s students. Even then, the differences stemmed from basic guidelines Mr. Conscientious insisted his students write to, which included providing context sentences at the outset of their essay introductions. 

Educators have also poured resources into teaching writing, with increasing numbers of hours dedicated to teaching writing across primary, secondary, and higher education. Yet studies continue to find writing skills inadequate [1]. In higher education, most universities require at least a year of writing-intensive courses, with many universities also requiring writing across the curriculum or writing in the disciplines to help preserve students’ writing skills. However, writing outcomes have remained mostly unchanged [2].

Photo by Andy Barbour, Envato

While pursuing my doctorate, I dedicated my research to figuring out how writing worked. As a graduate student also teaching part-time, I was an early convert to process writing. I also taught those ancient principles of logos, ethos, and pathos, as well as grammar and punctuation. Nevertheless, these frameworks only created a canvas for students’ writing. What was missing: how writers should handle words, sentence structure, and relationships between sentences.

Yet researchers published the beginnings of a science-based writing method over 30 years ago. Researchers George Gopen, Gregory Colomb, and Joseph Williams created a framework for identifying how to maximize the clarity, coherence, and continuity of writing.[3] In particular, Gopen and Swan (1990) created a methodology for making scientific writing readable. [4] This work should have been a revelation to anyone teaching in or directing a writing program. But, weirdly, comparatively few writing programs or faculty embraced this work, despite Williams, Colomb, and Gopen publishing both research and textbooks outlining the method and process.  

Peculiarly, this framework—represented by Williams’ Style series of textbooks and Gopen’s reader expectation approach—failed to become standard in writing courses largely because of two limitations. First, both Gopen and Williams hewed to a relativistic stance on writing methods, noting that rule-flouting often creates a memorable style. This stance created a raft of often-contradictory principles. For example, Williams advocated beginning sentences with There is or There are openings to shunt important content into sentence emphasis positions, where readers recall content best. Second, these researchers failed to tie this writing framework to the wealth of data in psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience, or cognitive psychology. For instance, all textbooks written by these three principal researchers avoid any mention of why emphasis positions exist at the ends of sentences and paragraphs—despite the concept clearly originating in the recency effect. This limitation may stem from the humanities’ long-held antipathy to the idea that writing is a product, rather than a process. Or even that science-based methods can help teachers and programs measure the effectiveness of writing, one reason why university First-Year Writing programs have failed to students’ writing in any measurable way.

Nevertheless, when you teach students how our reading brains work, you create a powerful method for rapidly improving their writing—in any course that requires writing and at all levels in education. Students can grasp how writing works as a system and assess the costs and benefits of decisions writers face, even as they choose their first words. This method works powerfully to help students immediately understand how, for instance, paragraph heads leverage priming effects to shape readers’ understanding of paragraph content.

Pressmaster, Envato

The results of using the ReadersBrain Method have been transformative for tens of thousands of students. In primary and secondary education, my colleagues and I have used them to create a thriving online learning academy for hundreds of ESL students in five countries. Students in grades 3-9 have bolstered both their reading and writing levels by as many as three grades in a single year. In higher education, thousands of students used the ReadersBrain Method to get jobs using a single writing assignment. And students in post-graduate education have used this method to rapidly get academic jobs, publications, grants, and promotions. One former student credited the ReadersBrain Method with enabling her to go from a post-doc position to full professor and a dean in nine years. As anyone in academia will tell you, a faculty member could cure cancer and raise the dead and still languish in an adjunct or associate-level position for a lifetime.

As we have discovered, the ReadersBrain Method works well across every kind of writing, from emails and expository essays to proposals and dissertations. Moreover, I’ve used these principles to standardize grading across dozens of sections of a 600-seat compulsory writing course, minimizing complaints about grading, even with grade-obsessed students in business. I’ve even turned these principles into grading rubrics that make even detail-oriented grading fast and efficient.

You can download these rubrics by joining my email list. You’ll find a link to the list on the ReadersBrain home page.

Sources

[1] Jani, J. S., & Mellinger, M. S. (2015). Beyond “Writing to Learn”: Factors Influencing Students’ Writing Outcomes. Journal of Social Work Education, 51(1), 136–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2015.977177

[2] Wardle, Elizabeth. (2013). Intractable Writing Program Problems, Kairos, and Writing about Writing: A Profile of the University of Central Florida’s First-Year Composition Program. Composition Forum 27, Spring 2013. http://compositionforum.com/issue/27 

[3] Williams, Joseph. Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. University of Chicago Press, 1995. 

[4] Gopen, G. D. and J. A. Swan (1990). "The Science of Scientific Writing." American Scientist 78(6): 550-558.

Gopen, George. The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader’s Perspective. Pearson: 2004.

Gopen, George. Expectations: Teaching Writing from the Reader’s Perspective. Pearson: 2004.

Williams, Joseph. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Harper Collins, 1994. 

Williams, Joseph. Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace. Longman, 2002.