Some crucial differences between high school and college writing: From high school to college

by Joseph M. Williams and Lawrence McEnerney

Some students make very smooth transitions from writing in high school to writing in college, and we heartily wish all of you an easy passage. But other students are puzzled and frustrated by their experiences in writing for college classes. Only months earlier your writing was winning praise; now your instructors are dissatisfied, saying that the writing isn’t quite “there” yet, saying that the writing is “lacking something.” You haven’t changed–your writing is still mechanically sound, your descriptions are accurate, you’re saying smart things. But they’re still not happy. Some of the criticism is easy to understand: It’s easy to predict that standards at college are going to be higher than in high school. But it is not just a matter of higher standards: Often, what your instructors are asking of you is not just something better, but something different. If that’s the case, then you won’t succeed merely by being more intelligent or more skillful at doing what you did in high school. Instead, you’ll need to direct your skills and your intelligence to a new task.

We should note here that college is a big place and that you’ll be asked to use writing to fulfill different tasks. You’ll find situations where you’ll succeed by summarizing a reading accurately and showing that you understand it. There may be times when you’re invited to use writing to react to a reading, speculate about it. Far more often–like every other week–you will be asked to analyze the reading, to make a worthwhile claim about it that is not obvious (state a thesis means almost the same thing), to support your claim with good reasons, all in four or five pages that are organized to present an argument (If you did that in high school, write your teachers a letter of gratitude.).

Argument: a key feature of college writing

Now by “argument” we do not mean a dispute over a loud stereo. In college, an argument is something less contentious and more systematic: It is a set of statements coherently arranged to offer three things that experienced readers expect in essays that they judge to be thoughtful:

• They expect to see a claim that would encourage them to say, “That’s interesting. I’d like to know more.”

• They expect to see evidence, reasons for your claim, evidence that would encourage them to agree with your claim, or at least to think it plausible.

• They expect to see that you’ve thought about limits and objections to your claim. Almost by definition, an interesting claim is one that can be reasonably challenged. Readers look for answers to questions like “But what about . . . ?” and “Have you considered . . . ?”

This kind of argument is less like disagreeable wrangling, more like a friendly and spirited conversation with someone whom you respect and who respects you; someone who is interested in what you have to say, but will not agree with your claims just because you made them; someone who wants to hear your reasons for believing your claims and also wants to hear answers to their questions.

At this point, some students ask why they should be required to convince anyone of anything. “After all,” they say, “we are all entitled to our opinions, so all we should have to do is express them clearly. Here’s my opinion. Take it or leave it.” This point of view both misunderstands the nature of argument and ignores its greatest value.

It is true that we are all entitled to our opinions and that we have no duty to defend them. But universities hold as their highest value not just the pursuit of new knowledge and better understanding, but the sharing of that knowledge. We write not only to state what we think, but also to show why others might agree with it and why it matters. We also know that whatever it is we think, it is never the entire truth. Our conclusions are partial, incomplete, and always subject to challenge. So, we write in a way that allows others to test our reasoning: we present our best thinking as a series of claims, reasons, and responses to imagined challenges, so that readers can see not only what we think, but whether they ought to agree.

And that’s all an argument is–not wrangling, but a serious and focused conversation among people who are intensely interested in getting to the bottom of things cooperatively.

Those values are also an integral part of your education in college. For four years, you are asked to read, do research, gather data, analyze it, think about it, and then communicate it to readers in a form which enables them to assess it and use it. You are asked to do this not because we expect you all to become professional scholars, but because in just about any profession you pursue, you will do research, think about what you find, make decisions about complex matters, and then explain those decisions–usually in writing–to others who have a stake in your decisions being sound ones. In an age of information, what most professionals do is research, think, and make arguments. (And part of the value of doing your own thinking and writing is that it makes you much better at evaluating the thinking and writing of others.)

Interpreting assignments: a guide to professors’ expectations

Not all of your instructors will be equally clear about what they expect of your writing. Some will tell you in detail what to read, how to think about it, and how to organize your writing, but others will ask a general question just to see what you can do with it. Some instructors will expect you to stay close to the assignment, penalizing you if you depart from it; others will encourage you to strike out on your own. Some few instructors may want you to demonstrate only that you have read and understood a reading, but most will want you to use your understanding of the reading as a jumping-off point for an analysis and an argument.

So your first step in writing an assignment occurs well before you begin writing: You must know what your instructor expects. Start by assuming that, unless you see the words “Summarize or paraphrase what X says about . . . ,” your instructor is unlikely to want just a summary. Beyond this point, however, you have to become a kind of anthropologist, reading the culture of your particular class to understand what is said, what is not, and what is intended.

Start by looking carefully at the words of the assignment. If it is phrased in any of these ways, one crucial part of your task has been done for you:

• “Agree or disagree: ‘Freud misunderstood the feminine mind when he wrote . . . .’”

• “Was Lear justified in castigating Cordelia when she refused to . . . ?”

More likely, however, your assignments will be less specific. They won’t suggest opposite claims. Instead, they’ll give you a reasonably specific sense of subject matter and a reasonably specific sense of your task:

• “Illustrate,” “explain,” “analyze,” “evaluate,” “compare and contrast,”
• “Discuss the role that honor plays in The Odyssey. “
• “Show how Molière exploits comic patterns in a scene from Tartuffe.”

None of these assignment prompts implies a main point or claim that you can directly import into your writing. You get no credit for asserting the existence of something we already know exists. Instead, these assignments ask you to spend four or five pages explaining the results of an analysis. Words such as “show how” and “explain” and “illustrate” do not ask you to summarize a reading. They ask you to show how the reading is put together, how it works. If you asked someone to show you how your computer worked, you wouldn’t be satisfied if they simply summarized: “This is the keyboard, this is the monitor, this is the printer.” You already know the summary–now you want to know how the thing does what it does. These assignments are similar. They ask you to identify parts of things–parts of an argument, parts of a narrative, parts of a poem; then show how those parts fit together (or work against one another) to create some larger effect.

If after all this analysis of the assignment you are still uncertain about what is expected of you, ask your instructor. If your class has a peer mentor, ask that person. If for some reason you can’t ask either, make an appointment at the Tutoring and Learning Services (TLS). Do this as soon as possible. You’re not likely to succeed on an assignment if you don’t have a clear sense of what will count as success. You don’t want to spend time doing something different than what you’re being asked to do.

Be Proactive Challenge:

• Find your writing professor’s office and say “Hi” or just make sure you know where it is.
• If their office hours are on Zoom, practice using their zoom link and pop in to say “Hi” or ask questions.
• Stop by the writing center or go online and familiarize yourself with setting up an appointment.

CC LICENSED CONTENT INCLUDED

Composing Ourselves and Our World,  Provided by: the authors. License: Attribution 4.0                   International (CC BY 4.0)

This chapter contains an adaptation of About this course:  by Lumen Learning, and is used under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

This chapter contains an excerpt from  Writing in College: A Short Guide to Writing in College Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives license. Joseph M. Williams and Lawrence McEnerney, The University of Chicago.