The Importance of Writing For Kaplan Students > Karen Watson, Part-time Faculty Psychology

I have been an instructor for the Psychology department at Kaplan University for about seven months now. I have just completed my second term teaching two classes: Contemporary Issues in Psychology and the History of Psychology. I have experience teaching prior to Kaplan, but will focus on my Kaplan teaching thus far.

Students at Kaplan come in a variety of ages, skills, experiences, and writing abilities. We all have our strong writers, our weak writers, and our mediocre writers in our classes. Grading the work of the strong writers is easiest for me. I can sit back, relax, and take in their messages.  Nothing really interferes with what they have to say, and I can grade their work based on the points that they are making. The mediocre writers need a little help here or there, some reminders to proofread, spell check, and re‐check their APA guidelines. The weak writers create the most work with regards to grading.

The Kaplan students that have weak writing skills are often the ones that leave me most unsettled as an instructor. Often, I can hear the messages that they are trying to get across in their writing. Unfortunately, those messages get blemished with the grammar and spelling problems that continue to plague them. Often these are the students that come across as insecure with their achievement abilities in the class. As their instructor, I can infer their motivation and efforts through their messages, while acknowledging the camouflage that their writing ability is creating.

In other words, their messages are covered up by their bad grammar and spelling. In this era of memo writing, emailing, texting, and treatment planning, what becomes of poor writers? In the workplace, will anyone take the time to decipher their messages, or will their work be ignored and perceived as inferior and incompetent? That is my fear for these students, and it is important for instructors to impress upon their students the importance of correcting these problems.

I try to give them a lot of encouragement to utilize the Writing Center, to re‐learn the grammar rules, spellcheck, and proofread over and over. But oftentimes, the weak writing continues, and I wonder if these students just view my critiques as more fuel for their insecurities in their intellectual abilities. Writing ability is not the same as intelligence. It is not the same as competence either. It is more or less the package in which you are delivering your message. If the package doesn’t look good, people may not even bother to open it. The intelligence and ability can be there, but they need to address the writing that is presenting their thoughts. I tell my students that their thoughts and messages deserve to be heard. They deserve to be taken seriously. Learning to write well increases the chance that their abilities will get the recognition they deserve.

[This article was originally published in our August, 2009 issue.]