Sometimes we need to return to the 'obvious'

This week's Scott Young blog post featured some thoughts based on the idea that "everything is obvious once you know the answer," and the timing connected perfectly with this week, which is the last of the fall semester for my college writing classes.

His conclusion is that most people he knows tend to fall into one of two camps when it comes to taking and using advice.

I, of course, translated "most people" into "most students." A large group of students believe in "secrets." They are quite certain that there are special methods and ideas that can make you a successful academic writer (or any sort of writer). They are in the class hoping I will reveal those secrets. I have met so many students who believe there must be some sort of "recipe" that they can follow on the road to success.

A second group of students believes they already know what to do to succeed, but that a lack of willpower, motivation, or talent is holding them back. These may be students who have been exhorted to "work harder," whatever that means.

Perhaps the lack of rapid progress among my college writers is due to most students missing the "obvious" points... despite me repeating them over and over all term. 

The problem may be that advice like "show, don't tell," and "no claims without support" are too obvious to many students, since they have heard teachers urging them to write with those simple ideas in mind for years. 

Here is Young's concluding sentence: "... it’s about figuring out which boring, yet plausible, account of how things work is actually right."

I will try to keep this idea more firmly in my head as I make adjustments in the spring semester courses I will take on, and am thinking I should make this idea explicit in my first week's readings. Maybe THAT tactic will flip some sort of switch and allow students to unlock the many examples they have in their memories and finally share them on paper (or the screen, in my case). 

I suspect that students tend to find my repeating "show us" and "use specific examples" as boring because I am a bit bored simply typing versions of those two pieces of writing advice over and over, for years and years, with little evidence that anyone is incorporating tried and true advice into their essays, reviews, and reports. 

Some of my college writers think they are poor writers because they aren't solid on basic grammar and sentence structure, and while I do want college writers to be more precise in their mechanics, what is really at the heart of their writing problems is that they can't seem to create a clear thesis/claim to work from. 

Many just sit down at the computer and start "writing their way" into what they want to say... and once they finally get to a meaningful point they almost always choose to not return to all the junk they used to get themselves there. 

Just typing the above statement into this blog leads me to a new goal for this spring: Slow down the course early and concentrate on strong theses and claims... and only then ask for more complete essays that provide compelling evidence that will back up those claims.

My error has been to assume that my college students had covered how to write a solid claim in high school and earlier college classes. 

That is an assumption that is not working.