Another disappointing college writing assignment

I just finished grading a set of cover letters written by students in my Composing Arguments course. A cover letter should be an argument that tries to convince a reader to bring the writer in for an in-person interview, and is a great place to begin sharing personal stories. 

I have been emphasizing all semester the importance of supporting our claims. I have had exercises that literally forced students to add a clause beginning with "for example" to a sentence. I have marked down essay after essay that continues to settle for claims without any evidence. 

To my chagrin, nothing I have done is making much of a difference with the vast majority of my students. They continue to write lists of unsupported claims: "I am passionate about x." "I have years of experience working in complex teams." "I have excellent time management skills."

Well, maybe. But doesn't every job applicant CLAIM these sorts of attributes? What a reader wants is evidence that takes us beyond the expected claims and moves us into beginning to understand a writer's story. 

I am constantly writing comments like "Try to show yourself in action to support your claim." I have lots count of how many times I have made some version of this. It boils down to "show, don't tell," which has been around so long that it may have become invisible. 

But it's still the key to success for writers. 

I understand that online courses can create all sorts of communication issues between professor and student, but I hoped that explicitly stating the need for supporting claims from day one, followed by assignments and quizzes and personal comments on weekly work might eventually break through the lazy defaults students bring with them.

Perhaps the failure of most students in my classes to incorporate "show, don't tell" into their writing assignments is connected to their pandemic PTSD. If so, I have wasted so much time offering advice through comments. 

I suspect, though, that this is mostly a function of not reading the assignment prompts carefully and not spending much time on writing more than one draft.

One way a teacher might work on the crappy initial drafts that are uploaded would be to require students to submit a second (or maybe a third) draft. Those would come after I have a chance to insert comments on their assignment. That seems so darn logical, and I did use this process for decades with students at the high school level. 

But my experiences eventually led me to the conclusion that spending loads of time on any one assignments ended up getting us nowhere. An important exception was my work with writers in journalism, where we might end up with five drafts before the piece was ready for publication.

The strategy I settled on for this particular online class was to assign dozens of shorter pieces of writing over the course of the semester, allowing me to focus on certain areas each time and providing students many opportunities to engage with creating effective arguments. My reasoning was that over the course of an entire term, the repetition and the regularity of multiple writing assignments would increase fluidity and reduce anxiety.

I probably was wrong. Something is not connecting. Something will need to change.