“Making Writing Meaningful: A Guide for Higher Education,” published this month, acts as a practical aid for instructors to help foster a dialogue around what constitutes meaningful writing practice in the classroom.
Even amid the explosive growth of generative artificial intelligence and other digital tools, college students today are writing more than ever before, says Neal Lerner, professor of English at Northeastern University.
But academic writing — whether of the self-sponsored kind that students might encounter in the humanities, or more rigid forms found in other disciplines — leaves a lot to be desired, he says.
In a book co-authored with colleagues at the University of Oklahoma and St. John’s University, Lerner brings some of the issues facing writing in higher education to light.
“Teaching writing is really hard,” Lerner says. “It’s hard to do, it’s hard to teach, and there is no secret sauce.”
“Making Writing Meaningful: A Guide for Higher Education,” published this month, acts as a practical aid for instructors and to help foster a constructive dialogue around what constitutes meaningful writing practice in the classroom.
The book uses survey data to distill the wants and needs of students as it relates to the written word, while also presenting a set of strategies and exercises for instructors to connect with their students. It’s a follow-up to a joint project addressing the same topic based on interviews with students and faculty in higher education conducted more than a decade ago, Lerner says.
Lerner and his colleagues surveyed over a thousand students across disciplines and majors at several colleges and universities, probing them about what writing projects they thought most meaningful — and what made them so.
“Perhaps the most important thing we can say is students have meaningful writing experiences and want to have meaningful writing experiences,” Lerner says.
The book coalesces around three major themes. The first is that students communicated a desire to make meaningful connections through their writing, whether by connecting with faculty, peers or family members. Perhaps most importantly, Lerner says, they want their writing to reflect connections within the students’ own lives and the larger world.
“They wanted their writing to be read and to acknowledge that it had been read,” Lerner says.
The second theme is that students wanted their writing to be consequential, which is not the same, he says, as writing about consequences.
“Consequential writing is writing that feels like it had a payoff in some way,” Lerner says. “It could be tied to their careers: writing as an architect, engineer, scientist or journalist. And we contrast that with writing that is simply about consequences, which are all those formal rules they’re expected to follow, like whether your citation format is correct, the grade you expect to get from the assignment, etcetera.”
Unsurprisingly, Lerner and his colleagues also discovered that giving students a choice in what they write mattered greatly. That informs the book’s final theme: writing that is “expansively framed.” It’s the idea that students should get to exercise some agency — a little creative control — over the process, such as how their identities and personal experiences inform their perspectives on a subject they’ve been tasked to write about.
“Students told us in one really simple but powerful way: let us choose! Let us be creative!” he says.
“The painful part of this project was realizing how few opportunities students have to write what they want to write,” he says.
That choice spans not just subject matter, but also format and — for those predisposed to English or creative writing — genre.
Thinking seriously about the ways colleges and universities foster students’ writing is a way to resist what Lerner describes as a culture in which students view writing as part of a larger transaction. Researchers have written extensively about the commercialization of higher education, and how it has led to a growing fixation on outcomes and ends (grades, degrees) at the expense of process and means.
“What I mean by transactional is that students are writing to get it done in order to get that grade they need,” Lerner says. “And faculty are aware of that, but may often be ill-equipped to create opportunities for meaningful writing. That is the point of our new book.”
As for the encroachment of technology on the writing process in pedagogical settings, Lerner takes the long view.
“Technology has been around for a long time, and we’ve used technology in both good and harmful ways,” he says.
“I think the writing program here at Northeastern has been really good at being on top of this for a couple of years now,” he says. “The bottom line is about how we can use these tools to our advantage and not lose agency.”