The Bad Writing Habits We Learned in School: And Advice to Forget Them
‘Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.’
Intro: Why Term Papers Need to Go
If you’re an undergraduate student right now, you are probably consuming and sharing more forms of communication than at any time in history: texts, blogs, Instagram, tweets, TikTok, email, news.
You are a node in a fast-moving network of incoming and outgoing communication of all kinds.
In a society in which most of us are immersed in massive amounts of information, sociology professor Deborah Cohan writes, the power of writing lies not merely in the ability to absorb and recycle endless amounts of information, but more so: “to appreciate essence, nuance, and depth, to distill and focus on important points without convenient guides to translate all the ideas for [us].”
It’s with this ethos of what writing enables us to do that Cohan calls for the end of a modern staple of higher education: the end-of-semester, final ‘term paper.’
In her essay, The Case Against the Term Paper, Cohan writes:
“It is all the more urgent and pressing for young people to receive assignments in which they are asked to untether, to slow down, to pare down and reflect — to write as a way to think and come to know what they know and feel what they feel.
I try to help students see that this is a process of writing born out of the clarity of silence, stillness and solitude; that it is a way of forging a sense of voice and style in writing; that they have to meditate on what they have read and on what they think; that this requires careful and thoughtful attention; and that they have to sit with the discomfort of writing and rewriting, of deleting and writing anew.”
“Good (writing) habits make time your ally.”
“It is a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up.” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Unless we’ve developed a daily, low-stress writing practice, much of our training as writers–through high school, undergraduate school, and grad school–involves a single end-of-term paper, or in the case of grad school, a seminar paper, that we are to complete, and swiftly forget about, at the end of each semester.
Most teachers I imagine believe that learning to write effectively is as important as spoken communication in terms of life skills. So it would seem reasonable that in order to develop our writing skills for effective communication, we should approach the task in the same way we might approach developing any new habit: by investing our time in frequent, low-stress contact with our writing project.
Or, as habit-guru James Clear puts it:
“Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.”
Rather than teaching good daily writing habits, assigning term papers to undergraduates more often tends to encourage the end-of-semester ritual of last-minute, late-night, caffeine-fueled benders in a race to complete long-put-off writing.
As Joli Jensen puts it, the dominant model for teaching writing in higher ed overwhelmingly involves “infrequent, high-stress contact with projects that come to feel like albatrosses”:
“Writing productivity research and advice can be summarized in a single sentence: In order to be productive we need frequent, low-stress contact with a writing project we enjoy. Our problem is that academic life offers us the exact opposite: infrequent, high-stress contact with projects that come to feel like albatrosses.”
– Joli Jensen, Write no Matter What
In other words, writing assignments loom over students’ futures like a slowly-approaching hurricane.
While many of the courses I have taught over the years involved writing a final research paper, I have come to feel that this is probably the worst way to teach and learn how to write effectively.
In fact, term papers likely socialize a good portion of us into more effective ways to avoid writing.
Chon A. Noriega, a professor of film and director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA, usefully describes the situation like this:
“One usually gets better at whatever one does on a regular basis. If one does not write on a regular basis, one will get better at not writing. In fact, one will develop an astonishing array of skills designed to improve and extend one’s not writing.”
9 core skills writing assignments should cultivate
Eric Hayot, in his excellent book, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities, tells about one such effort to (almost) do away with term papers. In the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford, professors there, realizing that too many students were asking for incompletes to make up their work over the summer, decided to try something else.
Students were collapsing under the pressure of writing 4 or more lengthy-term papers for each of their classes. So the department opted for a new format: students could choose which course to do a full-length term paper and complete a collection of shorter, spaced-out assignments for their other classes.
What was the pedagogical goal of these short writing assignments?
Well, the details are a bit murky, but from what Hayot explains, it seems this strategy proved to be an overall success for the department, not just for the students but for the teachers as well: the number of incomplete assignments did not just diminish, but the quality of student writing increased.
More specifically, Hayot suggests 9 key points that shorter, more frequent writing assignments can help us develop in our writing. He chunks these skills into three categories: writing ethos, structure, and metadiscourse:
#1 Writing Ethos
- Developing psychological strategies to capitalize on when you are motivated to write (sunrise, night, after a workout?), with the skill to integrate writing into the pressures of other kinds of work that you do.
- Cultivating a set of habits that builds your foundation for writing. As James Clear puts it, “Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.” This includes all the habits that make writing possible for you, which admittedly is super individual. What repertoire of habits are you developing to improve your writing?
- Constructing your writing ‘ethos,’ or the reasons for ‘why’ you write.
#2 Writing Format and Structure
4. Understanding the different formats of writing– memoir, essay, review, research article, critique, book– and how they can relate to one another and combine together.
5. Knowing how to argue your perspective logically and persuasively in each of the formats, having a good grip on grammar, stylistic choices, and ways to structure your writing effectively.
6. Using different kinds of evidence to support your writing and how to give credit to your sources properly.
#3 Metadiscourse
7. Framing the flow of your argument to help your reader follow where you’re taking them, and to organize the arguments that your making, such as using different sections and well-placed transitions.
8. Grasping how grammar, metaphor, figurative language, and other aspects of style affect your writing at the sentence-level and paragraph-level.
9. Apprehending how all these elements fit together to produce your own, unique writing style.
Conclusion: If you can only do one thing, do that one thing!
“We rarely think about change this way because everyone is consumed by the end goal. But one push-up is better than not exercising. One minute of guitar practice is better than none at all. One minute of reading is better than never picking up a book. It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.”
– James Clear
Experiments to put term papers on the chopping block, like at Stanford, are resonating with wider discussions among professional writers. I see flocks of tweets, especially from academics, about the unhealthy writing habits our education system has socialized us into. And as a consequence, the bad writing habits many of us have unfortunately carried with us into our writing careers later on in life.
While back-to-back, all-day writing binges every few weeks may enable some professional writers to produce a lot writing (a skill honed over many years of deadline-induced writing benders) the toll this ultimately takes on our physical and mental health is leading to more open debate about what a healthy writing practice should look like: and it seems the term paper is one of the first assignments to be put on the chopping block.
Especially in these times, it’s important to put health first. So let’s ditch the bad habits that we learned from term papers: binging on infrequent, high-stress writing projects that come to feel like albatrosses.
Instead, let’s teach and learn writing skills that develop healthy, daily writing practices. But to be clear, a daily writing practice might not even involve writing at all on some days. Instead, it may be as simple as doing one thing involving a writing project. Maybe it’s just opening the document to ‘stay in touch’ with something you wrote before: