Make or Break College Preparedness Skills: Academic Writing

 

Start Early

By Amy Barr, Lively Classical Guide at The Lukeion Project

There will always be room for creative writing in life. If you have a calling to compose poetry or to craft the next great novel, please continue. If your day moves more smoothly after a good journaling session, carry on. Nothing that I say here should change this about you and how you are wired. Likewise, may all our different types of creatives flourish even in these hard times.

That said, most of us will never return to composing free verse, limericks, or sweeping fiction again after we start our high school years, and that’s also ok. Your writing years are far from over. Many prefer academic writing. During these important years, projects—even for our creatives—must transition to a range of styles that can be just as meaningful as a poignant ecphrasis or just as heart-melting as a sonnet yet differently creative. Let’s talk about academic writing.

If you have ever had to slog your way through a dry textbook, an intractable scholarly article, or a poorly composed instruction manual, you have experienced firsthand how much the world needs good academic writers. Yet academic writing often gets too little love and scarce attention during the high school years. Skills gained in deeply introspective journaling exercises or elegiac couplets are great, but they will not easily translate to precise, concise, persuasive writing with clear analysis. Too often high school educators—including home school parents—expect academic writing skills to be offered in college while college professors insist that all those basics to be taught years earlier. The winners in the debate tend to be the tutors at the college writing labs where many poorly prepared students go to make up missed skills in their free time. Students need preparation.

Well prepared academic writers will start working on their skills no later than 8^th or 9^th grade. Students who practice academic writing acumen at every level will waltz through analytical essays in AP classes, they’ll flit through exam essays, dance through research papers, and do a smashing job at lab reports, scientific analyses, book reports, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, and the list goes on. Yet many assume creative writing skills translate effortlessly into the foreign language of style sheets, formal outlines, and proper citation. Nothing can be further from the truth. These are all things that need time and attention to detail (instruction and practice).

Parents: does your 8^th or 9^th grader need more focus on academic writing? Here's a short list of skills that students could use from early in high school through the rest of their education:

• Proper citation and style sheets (MLA, APA, etc.)
• Formal outlining
• Thesis statements, argument development, conclusions
• Evidence and analysis
• Precise/concise stylistic conventions
• Evaluation and appropriate use of good academic sources
• Persuasive and elegant use of language in a tone suitable to academic projects

Once a student can practice these skills in a variety of writing assignments, he or she should be asked to expand them to longer research projects, reports, and essays. With a bit more instruction, the first set of skills will translate well to the tools used in more interesting college assignments.

Thus our writing raison d'être at the Lukeion Project is to start academic writing skills early, practice them often, and challenge them again just before the college level. Starting out well-versed at what college classes expect in writing assignments means that at least a few of the worst stresses of the college experience will never manifest. 

A great foundation is Witty Wordsmith/Barbarian Diagrammarian in 7^th or 8^th grade. Next, 8^th or 9^th graders take the Skillful Scribbler course (and our new second-semester independent writing complement, Scribble On) to set students up for successful writing for the first few years of high school. By 11^th or 12^th grade, students should take College Composition in the autumn followed by College Research Writing in spring. Grade appropriate courses like Muse is perfect for our early high school, Classical Bard for 10^th or 11^th, and then mythology, history, or AP classes for our older students in 11^th or 12^th grade as those more difficult tasks correspond to skills mastered.

Students: when you get to college and sleep well the night before your first big research paper or lab report is due, let your instructors know they did a good job. We love to hear success stories.