Ep. 159 | Can Your Child Write A Coherent Sentence?

Show Notes: After months of college essay reviews with my private PrepWellers, I have concluded that writing skills have fallen off a cliff. How can you assess your child's writing skills and determine whether they need an intervention? Full Transcript: [00:00:24] Hello friends and welcome back to the PrepWell podcast. After weeks of reading, reviewing and commenting on college essays with my private PrepWellers and others, I felt it necessary to put out the following public service announcement to parents. Hear ye. Hear ye. Every year at a minimum, starting in middle school, parents need to get their hands on a sample of their child's writing to confirm that they know how to write in English in full sentences that make sense with appropriate punctuation, grammar and spelling. That's it. I don't want you to look for metaphors and similes and onomatopoeia and concision and clefts sentences, voice integration or anything remotely like this... at first. I actually don't want you to care too much about the topic or the quality of the thinking. I don't want you to look for any of those things yet. I simply want you to find out whether or not they can write a few sentences in a row that are coherent with a subject, a verb, and an object. That's it. For example, can they write a sentence like she scored a goal during the soccer game? I would be happy with this. A teacher can work with this. I can work with this. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer students that I work with can do this. And mind you, I work with, quote unquote, bright students from well-resourced communities and supportive parents and a track record of all A's in English. What I've been receiving from students, not all students, but an increasing number of them, especially in the last two years, which I'll address in a minute, are essay drafts that are unworkable. They're un-editable. [00:02:25] For example, a 400 word essay, which is about a half a page where every sentence needs massive revision and overhaul. Meaning when the sentence is rewritten and edited, it almost looks nothing like the original sentence. It's almost unrecognizable. I'm not talking about changing a word here or there to be a bit more precise or correcting subject verb agreements or getting rid of passive verbs that are used all over the place. I'm talking about a total rewrite from scratch for almost every sentence. I'm not talking about the quality of the content or whether the response even answers the essay question or whether it's logical or orderly or compelling or the strength of the vocab words. I'm just talking about individual sentences that on their own don't make any sense. Run on sentences, fragments, stream of consciousness, misspellings, weird parenthetical is all over the place. Many students are now writing as if they're talking or texting to a friend, with all of the informality and unconventional sentence structure inherent in everyday speech. This will become a problem for many students, not only when it's time to write competitive college essays, but when they actually go to college and they're expected to write in coherent sentences. And by the way, these issues are not isolated to students who've struggled with English and gotten C's or D's, for example, or students where English wasn't their first language. Or in schools with bad English departments. As I said, I see this trend in students from very strong schools who've gotten A's in every English class they've ever taken, including AP language and composition. I'm not sure how that happens, but it happens. What I've witnessed, particularly in the last 2 to 3 years with respect to writing, has been a complete breakdown. It just wasn't this way. Three years ago. Four years ago. And there are, in my opinion, a few obvious reasons why this might be happening. [00:04:46] Number one, nobody reads anymore. One of the best ways to become a good writer or a better writer is by reading. By reading, you see different writin