Through its National Gallery of Writing NCTE hopes to create a national portrait of America writing and to use the knowledge of who writes today, why, and what matters most to them to better understand how to use The NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing to advance writers everywhere but questions remain.
Are we in the midst of a writing revolution? Are more people composing than ever before—writing with more sophisticated tools for more nuanced purposes? Or are we mired in a crisis marked by a decline in both the style and substance of writing?
- In the third of his three-part series of New York Times Op-Eds, “What Should Colleges Teach?” (September 7, 2007), Stanley Fish says we have a writing crisis and argues that composition instruction in college needs to focus on forms that students must master in order to be articulate writers.
- Kathleen Blake Yancey, in her report Writing in the 21st Century suggests, “We …face three challenges that are also opportunities: developing new models of writing; designing a new curriculum supporting those models; and creating models for teaching that curriculum.
What do you think?
Do students write as well as they used to?
How do we best teach students to write?
Make your comments on this hot topic below.