I was teaching first year writing at Florida International University in the fall of 2017 when I noticed many of my students having trouble with concision. Their prose was bloated with redundant phrases and awkward, practically satirically academic diction. One day in class I was demonstrating how this language could be deflated and simplified by showing an anonymous example, extracting the underlying meaning, and rewording it to be as direct as possible. At the end of the demonstration a student raised her hand and said, “My teacher in high school told us to add more words to make our writing sound smarter.”

I was shocked. I had to take a step back and change my approach. I told them that concision is a prime virtue in expository writing, that when choosing between ways to express an idea, you should almost always choose the most direct and concise method.

But in the back of my mind, something else was going on. I hadn’t been teaching for very long then and it hadn’t yet occurred to me that beyond teaching good writing habits and skills, it was also my job to dispel harmful writing notions. It took me a few years outside my lucky – privileged – education to really understand how routinely the educational system fails students in the United States. One aspect of this failure I’ve found is consistently poor writing education.

I find that students reach the university level with either no effective writing education or some strange mixture of negative associations and bad advice. The bad advice can be as direct as “use more words so you sound smarter” or “an essay should have five paragraphs regardless of length,” but the negative associations are more abstract and seem socially, rather than institutionally, enforced. The general sense my students seem to have is that academic writing is esoteric, boring, highly formal, and almost bureaucratically rules-driven – not to mention utterly divorced from their, or anyone’s, real lives. The truth, of course, is precisely the opposite.

My goal in teaching is to emphasize to students that all people, by virtue of being able to speak a language, are inherently expert communicators. Their particular methods of communication may be particular to their familial, sociopolitical, and geographic context, but the language they possess is just as valid and viable for writing effectively as any other. I try to deconstruct and eliminate the so-called writing rules typical of traditional academic gatekeeping and return written expression to its human, ground level. What kinds of things are the students interested in saying? How do they normally say those things?

From there I think it’s possible to illustrate the power of writing not as a formalized process for fitting experience into the “correct” box, but learning what you already know, identifying what you don’t, and realizing an ideal or close to ideal structure for expressing what you want to say. I start with basic principles of written clarity – precise diction, paragraph structure – and expand on these ideas with project-relevant assignments so students can use these tools to explore issues relevant to their lives.

Want to talk about your grandfather’s role in enabling your family’s immigration? Tell me specific city names, describe the specific smells of his cooking, help me follow a story chronologically. Want to argue who the best basketball player of all time is? Make sure you clearly state your criteria, handle each one in its own paragraph.

By starting with student interest and their natural methods of expression, then showing them how they can refine their own thoughts through the power of draft-based writing, I hope to sidestep the restrictive confusions they’ve been taught or simply absorbed, and show students that whatever they want to express, and wherever they hope to express it, writing is powerful a tool for refining and structuring thought.