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    Differences Between High School and College Writing

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    Agberen Jemine
    The document discusses the key differences between high school and college writing. In high school, writing is primarily focused on in English classes, feedback is limited, and teachers have large class sizes. This means high school writing often involves simple formats like five-paragraph essays. In college, instructors teach fewer students and are specialists in their fields. They therefore assign more complex writing tasks and provide detailed feedback. Students may struggle at first with new types and topics of writing required for different college subjects. Successful academic writing relies on understanding an assignment's goals from keywords that indicate the expected approach.

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    Differences Between High School and College Writing

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    Agberen Jemine
    33 views4 pages
    The document discusses the key differences between high school and college writing. In high school, writing is primarily focused on in English classes, feedback is limited, and teachers have large class sizes. This means high school writing often involves simple formats like five-paragraph essays. In college, instructors teach fewer students and are specialists in their fields. They therefore assign more complex writing tasks and provide detailed feedback. Students may struggle at first with new types and topics of writing required for different college subjects. Successful academic writing relies on understanding an assignment's goals from keywords that indicate the expected approach.

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    The document discusses the key differences between high school and college writing. In high school, writing is primarily focused on in English classes, feedback is limited, and teachers have large class sizes. This means high school writing often involves simple formats like five-paragraph essays. In college, instructors teach fewer students and are specialists in their fields. They therefore assign more complex writing tasks and provide detailed feedback. Students may struggle at first with new types and topics of writing required for different college subjects. Successful academic writing relies on understanding an assignment's goals from keywords that indicate the expected approach.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    33 views4 pages

    Differences Between High School and College Writing

    Uploaded by

    Agberen Jemine
    The document discusses the key differences between high school and college writing. In high school, writing is primarily focused on in English classes, feedback is limited, and teachers have large class sizes. This means high school writing often involves simple formats like five-paragraph essays. In college, instructors teach fewer students and are specialists in their fields. They therefore assign more complex writing tasks and provide detailed feedback. Students may struggle at first with new types and topics of writing required for different college subjects. Successful academic writing relies on understanding an assignment's goals from keywords that indicate the expected approach.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 4

    Academic writing 

    refers to writing produced in a college environment. Often this is


    writing that responds to other writing—to the ideas or controversies that you’ll read
    about. While this definition sounds simple, academic writing may be very different
    from other types of writing you have done in the past. Often college students begin
    to understand what academic writing really means only after they receive negative
    feedback on their work. To become a strong writer in college, you need to achieve a
    clear sense of two things:

    1. The academic environment


    2. The kinds of writing you’ll be doing in that environment

    Differences between High School and College Writing


    Students who struggle with writing in college often conclude that their high school teachers were
    too easy or that their college instructors are too hard. In most cases, neither explanation is fully
    accurate or fair. A student having difficulty with college writing usually just hasn’t yet made the
    transition from high school writing to college writing. That shouldn’t be surprising, for many
    beginning college students do not even know that there is a transition to be made.

    In high school, most students think of writing as the subject of English classes. Few teachers in
    other courses give much feedback on student writing; many do not even assign writing. This says
    more about high school than about the quality of teachers or about writing itself. High school
    teachers typically teach five courses a day and often more than 150 students. Those students
    often have a very wide range of backgrounds and skill levels.

    These type of students are to reason along this line of action

     Summarize. To restate in your own words the main point or points of another’s work.
     Define. To describe, explore, or characterize a keyword, idea, or phenomenon.
     Classify. To group individual items by their shared characteristics, separate from other
    groups of items.
     Compare/contrast. To explore significant likenesses and differences between two or
    more subjects.
     Analyze. To break something, a phenomenon, or an idea into its parts and explain how
    those parts fit or work together.
     Argue. To state a claim and support it with reasons and evidence.
     Synthesize. To pull together varied pieces or ideas from two or more sources.
    Thus many high school English instructors focus on specific, limited goals. For example, they
    may teach the “five paragraph essay” as the right way to organize a paper because they want to
    give every student some idea of an essay’s basic structure. They may give assignments on stories
    and poems because their own college background involved literature and literary analysis. In
    classes other than English, many high school teachers must focus on an established body of
    information and may judge students using tests that measure only how much of this information
    they acquire. Often writing itself is not directly addressed in such classes.

    This does not mean that students don’t learn a great deal in high school, but it’s easy to see why
    some students think that writing is important only in English classes. Many students also believe
    an academic essay must be five paragraphs long or that “school writing” is usually literary
    analysis.

    Think about how college differs from high school. In many colleges, the instructors teach fewer
    classes and have fewer students. In addition, while college students have highly diverse
    backgrounds, the skills of college students are less variable than in an average high school class.
    In addition, college instructors are specialists in the fields they teach, as you recall from Chapter
    7 “Interacting with Instructors and Classes”. College instructors may design their courses in
    unique ways, and they may teach about specialized subjects. For all of these reasons, college
    instructors are much more likely than high school teachers to

     assign writing,
     respond in detail to student writing,
     ask questions that cannot be dealt with easily in a fixed form like a five-paragraph essay.

    Your transition to college writing could be even more dramatic. The kind of writing you have
    done in the past may not translate at all into the kind of writing required in college. For example,
    you may at first struggle with having to write about very different kinds of topics, using different
    approaches. You may have learned only one kind of writing genre, a kind of approach or
    organization and now find you need to master other types of writing as well.

    What Kinds of Papers Are Commonly Assigned in


    College Classes?
    Think about the topic “gender roles”—referring to expectations about differences in how men
    and women act. You might study gender roles in an anthropology class, a film class, or a
    psychology class. The topic itself may overlap from one class to another, but you would not
    write about this subject in the same way in these different classes. For example, in an
    anthropology class, you might be asked to describe how men and women of a particular culture
    divide important duties. In a film class, you may be asked to analyze how a scene portrays
    gender roles enacted by the film’s characters. In a psychology course, you might be asked to
    summarize the results of an experiment involving gender roles or compare and contrast the
    findings of two related research projects.
    It would be simplistic to say that there are three, or four, or ten, or any number of types of
    academic writing that have unique characteristics, shapes, and styles. Every assignment in every
    course is unique in some ways, so don’t think of writing as a fixed form you need to learn. On
    the other hand, there are certain writing approaches that do involve different kinds of writing.
    An approach is the way you go about meeting the writing goals for the assignment. The approach
    is usually signaled by the words instructors use in their assignments.

    When you first get a writing assignment, pay attention first to keywords for how to approach the
    writing. These will also suggest how you may structure and develop your paper. Look for terms
    like these in the assignment:

     Summarize. To restate in your own words the main point or points of another’s work.
     Define. To describe, explore, or characterize a keyword, idea, or phenomenon.
     Classify. To group individual items by their shared characteristics, separate from other
    groups of items.
     Compare/contrast. To explore significant likenesses and differences between two or
    more subjects.
     Analyze. To break something, a phenomenon, or an idea into its parts and explain how
    those parts fit or work together.
     Argue. To state a claim and support it with reasons and evidence.
     Synthesize. To pull together varied pieces or ideas from two or more sources.

    Note how this list is similar to the words used in examination questions that involve writing.
    (See Table 6.1 “Words to Watch for in Essay Questions” in Chapter 6 “Preparing for and Taking
    Tests”, Section 6.4 “The Secrets of the Q and A’s”.) This overlap is not a coincidence—essay
    exams are an abbreviated form of academic writing such as a class paper.

    Sometimes the keywords listed don’t actually appear in the written assignment, but they are
    usually implied by the questions given in the assignment. “What,” “why,” and “how” are
    common question words that require a certain kind of response. Look back at the keywords listed
    and think about which approaches relate to “what,” “why,” and “how” questions.

     “What” questions usually prompt the writing of summaries, definitions, classifications,


    and sometimes compare-and-contrast essays. For example, “What does Jones see as the main
    elements of Huey Long’s populist appeal?” or “What happened when you heated the chemical
    solution?”
     “Why” and “how” questions typically prompt analysis, argument, and synthesis essays.
    For example, “Why did Huey Long’s brand of populism gain force so quickly?” or “Why did
    the solution respond the way it did to heat?”

    Successful academic writing starts with recognizing what the instructor is requesting, or what
    you are required to do. So pay close attention to the assignment. Sometimes the essential
    information about an assignment is conveyed through class discussions, however, so be sure to
    listen for the keywords that will help you understand what the instructor expects. If you feel the
    assignment does not give you a sense of direction, seek clarification. Ask questions that will lead
    to helpful answers. For example, here’s a short and very vague assignment:

    Discuss the perspectives on religion of Rousseau, Bentham, and Marx. Papers should be four to
    five pages in length.

    Faced with an assignment like this, you could ask about the scope (or focus) of the assignment:

     Which of the assigned readings should I concentrate on?


     Should I read other works by these authors that haven’t been assigned in class?
     Should I do research to see what scholars think about the way these philosophers view
    religion?
     Do you want me to pay equal attention to each of the three philosophers?

    You can also ask about the approach the instructor would like you to take. You can use the
    keywords the instructor may not have used in the assignment:

     Should I just summarize the positions of these three thinkers, or should I compare and


    contrast their views?
     Do you want me to argue a specific point about the way these philosophers approach
    religion?
     Would it be OK if I classified the ways these philosophers think about religion?

    Never just complain about a vague assignment. It is fine to ask questions like these. Such
    questions will likely engage your instructor in a productive discussion with you.

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