I love editing essays. It's one of my greatest joys to help someone improve their writing, and I do it rather often considering the frustrating amount of essays non-humanities kids have to write in high school and college. I couldn't even tell you how many college essays I had to read over in senior year of high school. It was a lot.
The thing I always notice, though, when I'm reading these essays, is that the majority of students are completely lacking in a proper English writing foundation. Their grammar is terrible, their word choice is off, their sentence fluency is all over the place, and their essay structure and organization is practically nonexistent. It's like an alphabet zoo on paper. When I read these essays, my first thought is, "Who taught you to write like this? You should sue."
That last part is clearly a joke, but it doesn't make the issue itself any less serious. Students, especially the ones who don't specialize in humanities fields, don't know how to write. If they do, then it certainly isn't very good writing that they produce. The reason for that really isn't on them. It's entirely on their English teachers who failed to teach the basics. I once asked a friend about how her teachers taught her grammar, and I was genuinely horrified by the response. She said that they had somewhat taught grammar in middle school, but entirely stopped in high school. Even the middle school grammar, she said, was taught in the course of just a month or two.
Grammar is not a joke. Good writing is based on good grammar, and it should be the main focus of any middle school English class. I remember in my ninth grade class, I was shocked that most of my classmates didn't know what a prepositional phrase was. I had had an exceptional eighth grade English teacher (who, in fact, is one of the reasons I became an English major in the first place), but many students didn't have the luxury of one fantastic teacher who, in a year, taught them the fundamentals of the English language. This teacher did. She pushed grammar as a necessity, and I learned it eventually. My seventh grade teacher had done something similar. By high school, I found the grammar review to be boring and time-wasting. This is how all students should be.
My suggestion to all English teachers, especially those teaching middle school English, is to focus on writing. Literature is important, but not nearly as crucial to child development as learning how to write well. Teach students grammar, teach them to use active not passive voice, teach them when and where to use commas, teach them the different types of phrases and clauses and how to remember them. Students need these fundamentals, because it is impossible to be a good writer without them. If you don't teach them the basics, they're going to spend years of high school and college writing awkward and poorly structured papers and not understanding the grades that they get.
The thing about English is that, when students don't understand how it works, they grow to hate it. So many kids hate writing simply because they're not very good at it. They had bad English teachers, so they call themselves "not English kids." I know this to be true, because I felt the same way about math my whole life. When I was studying for the AP Statistics exam, my statistician cousin picked up my review book. He skimmed through it and shook his head, eventually saying, "No wonder you hate this class. They're teaching it to you all wrong." I realized then that it's not the subject we hate but the way it is taught to us.
I love English, so it hurts me to hear how much people hate writing. To all the English teachers out there, you can fix this. You have the power to make your students good writers, with a solid foundation that prepares them to face the world. Take this opportunity, use it to help your students grow.
