High School English Teachers Are Teaching Writing Incorrectly

Students are bad at writing. High school English teachers may be to blame.

If you went to high school in the United States, chances are that at some point in your educational career, you’ve been handed an assignment for your English class that asks you to write a 3-5 page essay (or any other page count, really—I imagine the number is closer to 1-2 pages these days as members of Gen Z completely sacrifice their attention spans to the TikTok Gods). 

This is a terrible way to assign essays. 

I teach personal essay writing for a living, overseeing the personal statement writing process from start to finish as my high school seniors prepare to package their college applications. These seniors, many of whom aspire to attend the Harvards and Stanfords of the world, have trouble hammering out a single coherent paragraph. Commas wander unfettered through sentences like free-range cattle, modifiers are misplaced more often than I misplace my keys, and diction is often clunky and undesirable. But the biggest writing faux pas that I see from my students on a daily basis is the use of precious English words to say absolutely nothing. 

What does it mean to use words to communicate absolutely nothing? Lucky for you, I came with some examples. Let’s take this opening sentence from a student’s application to the onetime prestigious Telluride Association Summer Program (I say onetime because Telluride, which boasts of distinguished alumni such as Francis Fukuyama and Walter Isaacson, has now devolved into an indoctrination center for Critical Black Studies and Anti-Oppressive Studies). 

Either way, going to Telluride will earn you Street Cred™ with colleges. Here’s what one student had to say about her desire to enroll in the program: 

I’m extremely interested in the Summer Seminars because I want to experience and explore new ways of learning that may improve my education. 

Let’s break this sentence down. Every sentence that we write should, ideally, communicate an insightful idea and function to move a piece of writing forward. Here, we learn that the student is interested in the program (this is a given because she is applying to it), that she wants to explore new ways of learning (this could mean anything from learning cursive to bungee jumping), and that she wishes to improve her education (this could mean either that she wishes to deepen her knowledge-base or that she wishes to explore alternative pedagogical methods to those that are offered at her school). After reading this sentence, I have learned no information about the student and have no desire to continue reading her essay. But the reason that this student—who has a 4.0 GPA and an impeccable standardized test score—wrote this sentence is not because she is intellectually challenged—she wrote a sentence like this because her English teachers taught her to write this way. 

The role of the high school English teacher is twofold: to promote the love of the great works of literature (they’re not doing that either) and to teach students to write a coherent essay. Think back to your English classes. You were likely taught to write an essay through some variation of the funnel technique: 

Congratulations. This is a terrible way to think about writing. No written statement should ever be broad. Your goal as a writer is to jump right into the specifics to most accurately communicate your ideas. While it is generally true that the opening statement to any essay might be marginally more broad than its thesis, if you teach fifteen-year-olds that they should be writing broad sentences to open essays, then they will produce sentences like the one I outlined above.

Let’s take another example. 

A significant part of my high school experience that has truly changed me for the better is my involvement in theater. 

This opening sentence from the college admissions personal statement similarly commits the sin of vagueness, yet what makes this sentence especially vague is its use of filler words. If we accept that the purpose of this sentence is to vaguely communicate an idea about theater, then we can at least reframe the sentence thus: 

My involvement in high school theater changed me for the better. 

The student does not tell us what specifically changed for the better about her or how her involvement in theater affected her, but at least my rewrite of this sentence communicates her identical message in half as many words. This student, I suspect, learned to write not only with the funnel technique but also with the dreaded 3-5 page essay assignments. Framing assignments in this way is a surefire way to encourage students whose ideas fill only a single page of writing to stretch their sentences to 3-5 pages by using as many unnecessary words as possible. The greatest challenge for a writer, in fact, is to write a strong and cohesive one-page essay because such space constraints leave no room for muddle. 

If we want to teach students to write, we should eliminate both the funnel method and these arbitrary page requirements. English teachers might receive shorter papers, but they are more likely to be clear. The more students are taught to attempt to stretch their writing out for as many pages as possible, the more they will internalize the practices of bad writing and have absolutely nothing to say. 

Let’s scrap this idea of the 3-5 page writing assignment and start teaching students that every word counts. The strong communicator is becoming an endangered species, and until high school English teachers reframe their pedagogical techniques, the members of our society will increasingly become slaves of ChatGPT—and that might cost us our souls.