You Won’t Improve your Writing Ability in University

The expectations that you have as a new student entering college or university is that you will learn things. There is an expectation that things will be different than they were in high school. Much to the relief of most of you, college or university is no more difficult than high school, there is much more free time, and as an adult, there are no constraints on what you can do with that free time.

Will you learn things? Of course. You will have lectures and exams, lectures and exams, and lectures and exams – with a few labs thrown in. You will learn stuff. Stuff about the subject you are studying.

But what about improving your skills? Skills that improve your ability to get good grades and skills that employers will want when you finish. You will have high-level skills when it comes to cramming for exams and passing them, but these skills aren’t really in high demand in the real world.

Sorry, but the skills that make you valuable in the world of work aren’t ever really taught.

Writing ability is a core skill that will help you get better grades, higher GPAs, and better degrees. But if you want to improve your writing abilities, you will have to do it on your own.

Ask any master’s student or someone sweating it out waiting to take their professional qualifications exams. No one ever took the time to teach them to write in university. A few of the keener students took it upon themselves to improve (research says that about 10% show a great deal of improvement), but there is no systematic program built in to help you improve your writing ability.

Not that there isn’t anyone who thinks you don’t need it. A study published by the Higher Education Research Institute reported 87% of all college and university professors regard improving writing ability as one of the most important parts of higher education. It just doesn’t happen.

And it isn’t just those in a college or university setting who think that writing ability is a critical skill to acquire – future employers think the same thing. But that’s next week’s article.

“How can you just say that, in general, students don’t improve their writing abilities in college and university?”, you might be asking. Read the research literature on the subject. You don’t have to look very hard to find this out for yourself.

In their massive study looking into the skills that college and university students gain while in school, Arum and Roska found that 45% (almost half) of the students studied showed NO SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT in their writing abilities in the first two years of college or university. Keep in mind that they found that 10% of the students showed a great deal of improvement. You can improve your writing ability, but most of you won’t. This is because it is difficult to be completely self-motivated when it comes to something as nebulous as improving your writing ability.

But, what about the final years of a degree? Do the first two years really tell you anything about the final outcome? Flowers’ research tells us that almost all of the “academic” improvement (not subject knowledge) occurs in the first two years of college or university.

So, what’s the bottom line? If you want to improve your writing abilities, it’s up to you. Everyone expects you to improve, but there isn’t anyone who is going to step in and make it happen – it’s up to you.

I recently wrote about why improved writing abilities improve your grades. I also wrote about how Socelor uses the most advanced teaching techniques to help you improve.

And, in our effort to constantly improve what we do, we are doing some research to see if our 10-week course can be shortened. To that end, we are looking for some interested volunteers to participate in a 6-week trial (at no cost to yourself) to measure the effects of a shortened course on writing improvements. The titles of the trial courses are “Evidence-Based Learning” and “Misinformation in Healthcare Crises”. When I finished writing this there were still a few places on the trials (starts October 18).

Have a look and see what you think. I’ll put a link on our front page to take you to the other articles that I have written about Socelor. Next week I’ll write about the expectations of employers when it comes to writing abilities.

Check us out at Socelor.com.