"High schools do a poor job of teaching writing."

Mariko Furukawa

The examiners for the college entrance exam say that the writing ability of high school students is very poor. Consider myself as an example, upon entering college, I did not know the major components of an essay such as the importance of a thesis, paragraph structure, or transitions. I agree that high schools do a very poor job of teaching writing.

First of all, many high schools do not offer any writing course. Writing courses are essential to obtain the skills to write profound papers. The benefits of the course are that students get more opportunities to write, work on revisions to refine the paper, and learn how to organize thoughts and present them. The students may learn the basic skills of composing an essay, and they may be able to develop the skills through writing many papers. In regular Japanese classes, however, students cannot spend as much time on one essay because many papers spanning various areas are assigned. When an assignment is given, usually the students merely turn it in, and the assignment is over. They have to move on to next assignment before they develop enough skills, and therefore their ability of applying the skills becomes very poor.

Second, most of the skills that students learn in regular Japanese class are for the purpose for entering college. The class gives students, as well as a writing course does, experience in reading, analyzing and writing for many different styles of papers that students do not encounter every day. These experiences are given in order to earn points in the entrance exam, necessary for being accepted to college. Students analyze the essay question in terms of what the expectations of an examiner are, write the response to not lose points instead of using other necessary writing skills such as theme, organization, and perspective. Logic of writing a slick essay to survive a tough competition for entering college is very well taught, but in many cases, it is of no practical use.

From a grammatical perspective, in the third place, a writing center is necessary. High schools do not have a writing center because the teachers are usually more available. It is possible for students to get help from the teachers, but the teachers cannot support every student fully, especially to work with trivial things as grammar, or spelling. It has been reported that students' ability of writing kanji (other Japanese characters based on Chinese characters) has descended. Due to this trend, it is more necessary to put more effort into students' grammatical skills. Even though schools test students on kanji, it is very difficult to correct mistakes in class. A writing center would definitely be effective to help students' writing kanji skills, let alone the skills of organizing paragraphs, setting a thesis, and others.

In the end, high schools do not a very good job of teaching writing. Even they do provide skills, they are not practical, or not to be practiced. Either setting up a writing course, or a writing center will be a definite help. Unless students put more effort into carrying out the skills they learn, and into a grammatical skill, high schools only do a poor job of teaching writing.