why can't i write essays anymore

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Why Kids Can’t Write

By Dana Goldstein

• Aug. 2, 2017

On a bright July morning in a windowless conference room in a Manhattan bookstore, several dozen elementary school teachers were learning how to create worksheets that would help children learn to write.

Judith C. Hochman, founder of an organization called the Writing Revolution, displayed examples of student work. A first grader had produced the following phrase: “Plants need water it need sun to” — that is, plants need water and sun, too. If the student didn’t learn how to correct pronoun disagreement and missing conjunctions, by high school he could be writing phrases like this one: “Well Machines are good but they take people jobs like if they don’t know how to use it they get fired.” That was a real submission on the essay section of the ACT.

“It all starts with a sentence,” Dr. Hochman said.

Focusing on the fundamentals of grammar is one approach to teaching writing. But it’s by no means the dominant one. Many educators are concerned less with sentence-level mechanics than with helping students draw inspiration from their own lives and from literature.

Thirty miles away at Nassau Community College, Meredith Wanzer, a high school teacher and instructor with the Long Island Writing Project, was running a weeklong workshop attended by six teenage girls. The goal was to prepare them to write winning college admissions essays — that delicate genre calling for a student to highlight her strengths (without sounding boastful) and tell a vivid personal story (without coming off as self-involved).

Ms. Wanzer led the students in a freewrite, a popular English class strategy of writing without stopping or judging. First, she read aloud from “Bird by Bird,” Anne Lamott’s 1995 classic on how to write with voice. “You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind,” the memoirist writes. “Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.”

Ms. Wanzer then asked the students to spend a few minutes writing anything they liked in response to the Lamott excerpt. Lyse Armand, a rising senior at Westbury High School, leaned over her notebook. She was planning to apply to New York University, Columbia and Stony Brook University and already had an idea of the story she would tell in her Common Application essay. It would have something to do, she thought, with her family’s emigration from Haiti following the 2010 earthquake that devastated the island. But she was struggling with how to get started and what exactly she wanted to say.

“What voice in my head?” she wrote in her response to the Lamott essay. “I don’t have one.”

Lyse needed a sense of “ownership” over her writing, Ms. Wanzer said. Lyse had solid sentence-level skills. But even when Ms. Wanzer encounters juniors and seniors whose essays are filled with incomplete sentences — not an uncommon occurrence — she limits the time she spends covering dull topics like subject-verb agreement. “You hope that by exposing them to great writing, they’ll start to hear what’s going on.”

Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to complete successfully a college-level English composition class, according to the company’s data.

Poor writing is nothing new, nor is concern about it. More than half of first-year students at Harvard failed an entrance exam in writing — in 1874. But the Common Core State Standards, now in use in more than two-thirds of the states, were supposed to change all this. By requiring students to learn three types of essay writing — argumentative, informational and narrative — the Core staked a claim for writing as central to the American curriculum. It represented a sea change after the era of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law that largely overlooked writing in favor of reading comprehension assessed by standardized multiple-choice tests.

So far, however, six years after its rollout, the Core hasn’t led to much measurable improvement on the page. Students continue to arrive on college campuses needing remediation in basic writing skills.

The root of the problem, educators agree, is that teachers have little training in how to teach writing and are often weak or unconfident writers themselves. According to Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a scan of course syllabuses from 2,400 teacher preparation programs turned up little evidence that the teaching of writing was being covered in a widespread or systematic way.

A separate 2016 study of nearly 500 teachers in grades three through eight across the country, conducted by Gary Troia of Michigan State University and Steve Graham of Arizona State University, found that fewer than half had taken a college class that devoted significant time to the teaching of writing, while fewer than a third had taken a class solely devoted to how children learn to write. Unsurprisingly, given their lack of preparation, only 55 percent of respondents said they enjoyed teaching the subject.

“Most teachers are great readers,” Dr. Troia said. “They’ve been successful in college, maybe even graduate school. But when you ask most teachers about their comfort with writing and their writing experiences, they don’t do very much or feel comfortable with it.”

There is virulent debate about what approach is best. So-called process writing, like the lesson Lyse experienced in Long Island, emphasizes activities like brainstorming, freewriting, journaling about one’s personal experiences and peer-to-peer revision. Adherents worry that focusing too much on grammar or citing sources will stifle the writerly voice and prevent children from falling in love with writing as an activity.

That ideology goes back to the 1930s, when progressive educators began to shift the writing curriculum away from penmanship and spelling and toward diary entries and personal letters as a psychologically liberating activity. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, this movement took on the language of civil rights, with teachers striving to empower nonwhite and poor children by encouraging them to narrate their own lived experiences.

Dr. Hochman’s strategy is radically different: a return to the basics of sentence construction, from combining fragments to fixing punctuation errors to learning how to deploy the powerful conjunctive adverbs that are common in academic writing but uncommon in speech, words like “therefore” and “nevertheless.” After all, the Snapchat generation may produce more writing than any group of teenagers before it, writing copious text messages and social media posts, but when it comes to the formal writing expected at school and work, they struggle with the mechanics of simple sentences.

The Common Core has provided a much-needed “wakeup call” on the importance of rigorous writing, said Lucy M. Calkins, founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University, a leading center for training teachers in process-oriented literacy strategies. But policy makers “blew it in the implementation,” she said. “We need massive teacher education.”

One of the largest efforts is the National Writing Project, whose nearly 200 branches train more than 100,000 teachers each summer. The organization was founded in 1974, at the height of the process-oriented era.

As part of its program at Nassau Community College, in a classroom not far from the one where the teenagers were working on their college essays, a group of teachers — of fifth grade and high school, of English, social studies and science — were honing their own writing skills. They took turns reading out loud the freewriting they had just done in response to “The Lanyard,” a poem by Billy Collins. The poem, which is funny and sad, addresses the futility of trying to repay one’s mother for her love:

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered, and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

Most of the teachers’ responses pivoted quickly from praising the poem to memories of their own mothers, working several jobs to make ends meet, or selflessly caring for grandchildren. It wasn’t sophisticated literary criticism, but that wasn’t the point. A major goal of this workshop — the teacher-training component of the Long Island Writing Project — was to get teachers writing and revising their own work over the summer so that in the fall they would be more enthusiastic and comfortable teaching the subject to children.

“I went to Catholic school and we did grammar workbooks and circled the subject and predicate,” said Kathleen Sokolowski, the Long Island program’s co-director and a third-grade teacher. She found it stultifying and believes she developed her writing skill in spite of such lessons, not because of them.

Sometimes, she said, she will reinforce grammar by asking students to copy down a sentence from a favorite book and then discuss how the author uses a tool like commas. But in general, when it comes to assessing student work, she said, “I had to teach myself to look beyond ‘There’s no capital, there’s no period’ to say, ‘By God, you wrote a gorgeous sentence.’ ”

Mrs. Sokolowski is right that formal grammar instruction, like identifying parts of speech, doesn’t work well. In fact, research finds that students exposed to a glut of such instruction perform worse on writing assessments.

A musical notion of writing — the hope that the ear can be trained to “hear” errors and imitate quality prose — has developed as a popular alternative among English teachers. But what about those students, typically low income, with few books at home, who struggle to move from reading a gorgeous sentence to knowing how to write one? Could there be a better, less soul-crushing way to enforce the basics?

In her teacher training sessions, Dr. Hochman of the Writing Revolution shows a slide of a cute little girl, lying contentedly on her stomach as she scrawls on a piece of composition paper. It’s the type of stock photograph that has probably appeared in a hundred educators’ PowerPoint presentations, meant to evoke a warm and relaxed learning environment, perhaps in one of the cozy writing nooks favored by the process-oriented writing gurus.

“This is not good writing posture!” Dr. Hochman exclaimed. Small children should write at desks, she believes. And while she isn’t arguing for a return to the grammar lessons of yesteryear — she knows sentence diagramming leaves most students confused and disengaged — she does believe that children should spend time filling out worksheets with exercises like the one below, which demonstrates how simple conjunctions like “but,” “because” and “so” add complexity to a thought. Students are given the root clause, and must complete the sentence with a new clause following each conjunction:

Fractions are like decimals because they are all parts of wholes .

Fractions are like decimals, but they are written differently .

Fractions are like decimals, so they can be used interchangeably .

Along the way, students are learning to recall meaningful content from math, social studies, science and literature. By middle school, teachers should be crafting essay questions that prompt sophisticated writing; not “What were the events leading up to the Civil War?” — which could result in a list — but “Trace the events leading up to the Civil War,” which requires a historical narrative of cause and effect.

“Freewriting, hoping that children will learn or gain a love of writing, hasn’t worked,” Dr. Hochman told the teachers, many of whom work in low-income neighborhoods. She doesn’t believe that children learn to write well through plumbing their own experiences in a journal, and she applauds the fact that the Common Core asks students to do more writing about what they’ve read, and less about their own lives.

“I call it a move away from child-centered writing,” she said approvingly, and away from what she considers facile assignments, like writing a poem “about a particular something they may have observed 10 minutes ago out of the window.”

“I don’t mean to be dismissive,” she continued, “but every instructional minute has its purpose.”

Her training session lacks the fun and interactivity of the Long Island Writing Project, because it is less about prompting teachers to write and chat with colleagues and more about the sometimes dry work of preparing worksheets and writing assignments that reinforce basic concepts. Nevertheless, many teachers who learn Dr. Hochman’s strategies become devotees.

Molly Cudahy, who teaches fifth-grade special education at the Truesdell Education Campus, a public school in Washington, D.C., said she appreciates Dr. Hochman’s explicit and technical approach. She thought it would free her students’ voices, not constrain them. At her school, 100 percent of students come from low-income families. “When we try to do creative and journal writing,” she said, “students don’t have the tools to put their ideas on paper.”

There is a notable shortage of high-quality research on the teaching of writing, but studies that do exist point toward a few concrete strategies that help students perform better on writing tests. First, children need to learn how to transcribe both by hand and through typing on a computer. Teachers report that many students who can produce reams of text on their cellphones are unable to work effectively at a laptop, desktop or even in a paper notebook because they’ve become so anchored to the small mobile screen. Quick communication on a smartphone almost requires writers to eschew rules of grammar and punctuation, exactly the opposite of what is wanted on the page.

Before writing paragraphs — which is often now part of the kindergarten curriculum — children do need to practice writing great sentences. At every level, students benefit from clear feedback on their writing, and from seeing and trying to imitate what successful writing looks like, the so-called text models. Some of the touchy-feel stuff matters, too. Students with higher confidence in their writing ability perform better.

All of this points toward a synthesis of the two approaches. In classrooms where practices like freewriting are used without any focus on transcription or punctuation, “the students who struggled didn’t make any progress,” Dr. Troia, the Michigan State professor, said. But when grammar instruction is divorced from the writing process and from rich ideas in literature or science, it becomes “superficial,” he warned.

Considering the lack of adequate teacher training, Lyse may be among a minority of students exposed to explicit instruction about writing.

In Ms. Wanzer’s workshop, Lyse and her classmates went on to analyze real students’ college essays to determine their strengths and weaknesses. They also read “Where I’m From,” a poem by George Ella Lyon, and used it as a text model for their work. Lyse drafted her own version of “Where I’m From,” which helped her recall details from her childhood in Haiti.

Lyse wrote: “I am from the rusty little tin roof house, from washing by hand and line drying.” It was a gorgeous sentence, and she was well on her way to a moving college application essay.

Dana Goldstein is an education reporter for The Times.

Our Students Can’t Write Very Well—It’s No Mystery Why

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My organization decided a few weeks back that we needed to hire a new professional staff person. We had close to 500 applicants. Inasmuch as the task was to help us communicate information related to the work we do, we gave each of the candidates one of the reports we published last year and asked them to produce a one-page summary. All were college graduates. Only one could produce a satisfactory summary. That person got the job.

We were lucky this time. We are more often than not disappointed at the subpar writing ability of the applicants for openings at our organization. Many applicants are from very good colleges. Many have graduate degrees. Many are very poor writers.

Their lack of writing ability does not augur well. When we look at what they have written, the logic of the narrative is often very hard to find. It would appear that their lack of writing ability stands as mute testimony to their lack of thinking ability.

How, we ask, could this have happened? The answers are not hard to find. My friend Will Fitzhugh points out that high school students are rarely required to read entire works of fiction and are almost never asked to read entire works of non-fiction. I know of no good writers who are not also good readers.

More directly to the point, high school students are hardly ever asked to write anything of significant length. Why not? Because in this age of accountability, they are not tested on their writing ability. By which I mean that they are not asked to submit to the testing authorities 10- or 15- or 20-page papers in which they are expected to present a thesis and defend it, analyze something complicated from multiple points of view and draw a reasoned conclusion, or put together a short story in which characters are developed in some depth and insights are revealed.

This point is critically important. There is only one way that we can find out whether a student can write a substantial research paper—by asking them to write a substantial research paper and looking carefully at the result. If we do not ask them to produce this product—over and over again, as they get better and better at it—then they will not be able to do it well. If they have not done the work, then neither their teacher nor the engines of the accountability system can assess it. If this sort of serious writing is not done and—in our accountability-oriented environment—is not assessed, then it will not be learned. End of argument.

Oh, sure, we have tests of writing ability for college-bound students, but they do not ask the student to produce anything like what we asked our candidates to produce. They ask a student to choose one word or phrase from a list to fill in the blank in a passage. That is not writing. It is something else. PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments have made progress in more effectively evaluating the writing skills of our students, but many states are actively taking steps away from these types of assessment tasks. And it is of course true that asking a student to write a one-page summary of a longer piece is no test of their ability to write a well-argued, fact-based, 10- or 20-page research paper.

We are fond of producing long lists of things we want 21 st century students to be able to do. But the ability to write well and think critically always tops the list, both because so much work requires these skills and because they are so fundamental to so many other kinds of cognitive activity we value. What could be more central to a good education?

So it is simply unbelievable that we do not build our curriculum around the assumption that we will be asking students to read demanding books—not just parts of books, but whole books—and then asking them to write, at length and in detail, about what they have read, explicating, analyzing, synthesizing and summarizing it, with insight and narrative skill that demonstrates their ability to think clearly. Isn’t that the heart of the matter?

Writing is a craft. Like any other craft, it is learned only by doing it, over and over and over, at increasing levels of challenge, under the watchful eye of an expert. How on earth are our students to learn to write if we do not ask them to write, and write a lot, and write well? The reason, of course, that they are not asked to write much is because their ability to write a substantial paper is not tested. And why, in this age of accountability, when we judge teachers by how well their students do on the test, would we expect their students to write well when we do not test their ability to write a good paper, 10 to 20 pages in length?

Our own research tells us that a large fraction of community college professors do not assign writing to their students because their students cannot write and the professors do not consider themselves to be writing teachers. It is no wonder that employers like us find it so hard to find candidates with serviceable writing skills.

What do you suppose would happen if a state announced one day that it was redesigning its accountability system and half of a teachers’ rating would henceforth depend on their students’ grades on long research papers in the subject taught by that teacher—papers, say, at least 15 pages long at the high school level? They might be told that that grade would depend on the way evidence was presented and marshaled, the range of the evidence presented, the depth of the analytical ability displayed in the essay, the logic and persuasiveness of the argument made, and so on.

I am not arguing that we should do this, but simply making the point that if we really cared about the ability of our students to think and write well, we would assign substantial papers frequently, critique those papers effectively, and expect students to write well long before they left high school. It is hard to reach any conclusion on this point other than that we simply don’t care whether or not our students can write effectively, if we judge by what is assigned to students, what is expected of students, the instruction we offer students, the way we evaluate their work, the design of our accountability systems or our criteria for graduating students from high school.

But assume for the moment that all these issues were addressed. Can we then assume that our students would be graduating high schools able to think clearly and write well? I don’t think so.

I said in passing above that writing is a craft and crafts are best learned by apprenticing oneself to an expert, in this case an expert writer. This suggests that if our students are to become good writers, they will have to get their work critiqued in detail by teachers who are themselves good writers.

But I also said at the beginning of this blog that we and many other employers are having a very hard time hiring anyone who is a good writer, even graduates of leading universities and graduate schools. We know that most of our teachers come not from our leading universities but from institutions that get their students from the lower half of the distribution of high school graduates going to college. If there is no reason to assume that the graduates of the leading institutions are themselves good writers, what would make us assume that the graduates of less demanding institutions are better writers?

It is true that many universities require applicants to submit a short essay as part of their application. But I am willing to bet that few, if any, require their applicants to do something as straightforward as our request to our job applicants to summarize a complex research paper in one page, on demand, in a short time, capturing all the key points and creating a narrative that makes sense of it all for the reader.

If we do not demand that those who want to become teachers are themselves very good writers, why would we expect our teachers to be good teachers of writing? We should, in fact, be requiring our candidates for teaching positions to write 20-page papers of their own which analyze and summarize a topic from the literature in their field. We should be asking them to produce, on demand, a one-page summary of something they are given to read that is complicated and difficult.

But we don’t do any of these things. So, once again, I conclude that we are not serious. We are not serious about teaching students to reason and write well and we are not serious about hiring teachers who have the skills needed to teach our students how to reason and write well. We are no doubt lucky to have many teachers who know how to read and write critically and care enough to pass those skills on to their students. But if these core skills were really important to us, we would be making very large changes in curriculum, demanding much more reading of complete novels and non-fiction, asking our students to write much longer papers much more frequently, providing expert and copious commentary on what they had written, changing our accountability systems to reflect these priorities and, not least, we would be making sure that our teachers are themselves very good writers.

I very much doubt that our high school graduates write less well than high school graduates used to write. But jobs for truck drivers, hamburger flippers and grocery store check out clerks are disappearing fast. This is just one more—but crucially important—arena in which our education system is failing to adapt to a fast-changing environment.

The opinions expressed in Top Performers are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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You Can’t Write Anymore? (10 Tips To Get Back On Track)

It’s so easy to take a break and then never get back on track with your writing.

Sometimes you’re overwhelmed, and the idea of starting another blog post feels like too much for you to handle. Or maybe you just feel like it’s not worth the effort anymore after starting and quitting several projects in a row. What if I told you there is a way to help you overcome writer’s block and write more ? That’s right. It’s doable. It’s as easy as following these tips.

10 Tips To Get Back On Your Writing Track If You Can’t Write Anymore:

1. start small and keep a writing schedule.

Start by prioritizing your writing tasks. For example, if you are working on three different projects, prioritize the shortest deadline to complete the most nagging job first. When you finish it, move on to the next one. It’s crucial to eat the elephant one bite at a time and put even the smallest task on your schedule (like, “write 100 words for project X”). Just a few suggestions: Plan for time-consuming activities before you start your writing session so there’s some structure to your day. If you know that an hour-long meeting is scheduled for tomorrow, schedule that much time for writing today . Set realistic deadlines and short-term goals to keep things under control and help yourself stay motivated . Making a schedule can help you maintain your momentum. It also helps you to make progress without getting discouraged by writer’s block or distractions. You might consider using a tool such as a Pacemaker Planner . It helps you set a specific writing goal and stick to it until you’ve completed your project.

2. Find Your Inspiration In Unusual Places

Inspiration can come from many places, but one of the most common examples is music. Listen to an artist or song that you find inspiring to get back on your writing track. Some people find it helpful to write about their feelings or any topics on their minds. Others find inspiration by reading other authors’ work , while others prefer to think about what they want to say before writing. Just try different methods until you’re able to get back to it. If you face writer’s block, simply sit down with your journal and aim to write a few sentences about how you feel or how could you improve your life. This will often get your creative juices flowing and allow your mind to open up to new ideas. You may also write a few emails and quite often this will reignite your literary machinery so you can write again.

3. Write First Thing In The Morning

Whether you’re a writer or a corporate professional, it’s essential to maintain a good writing routine. Sometimes that means starting your day with a few minutes of writing. Starting your day immersed in a clickety-clack of your keyboard is a great way to beat the stress and accomplish something important even before breakfast. It’s proven that just five minutes of writing can help reduce stress levels and give you a feeling of control. What if you could spend just five minutes each morning writing to relieve some of the pressure? Doing so will help you avoid distractions and stay focused on what needs to be done – without feeling too overwhelmed.

4. Set Realistic Writing Goals

It’s important to have realistic and measurable goals. 10,000 words a day and then days of burnout, anyone? If you set your goal too high, it can be even more difficult to get back on track. So setting realistic goals can help you maintain your motivation. It is a crucial component of a balanced writerly life. Let these goals be challenging enough, but not too demanding. If they are too easy, then you won’t be motivated to work hard. But if the goals are too difficult, you may become discouraged and quit before reaching your goal. So, set goals that are achievable and seem just within reach if you apply yourself. You also need to learn how to have a positive outlook on things – this will help keep you motivated and get back on track when needed. You might want to consider using a self-accountability app like Stickk . By putting money on the line, you create a real forcing system that will push you to get your work done on time.

It will be easier to commit to your goals when you write them down.

5. Write For Yourself Or Your Alter Ego

This may seem like a strange thing to propose, but it’s hard for writers to take the time to write for themselves. If you can’t think of anything else to write about, try to scribble about something you’re passionate about. Many benefits come from writing for yourself, such as You can improve your mental health and well-being by connecting with your innermost thoughts and feelings. Also, you will organize your thoughts and feelings in a more structured way than if you were to talk face-to-face about them. And lastly, when you write for yourself, you will maintain an honest tone as the fear of offending others or hurting their feelings will dissipate.

6. Read What You’ve Written And Pat Yourself On The Back

When you have completed a paragraph, look back and see how it reads. This will help you feel more confident in your work and give ideas for what you should do next. It also helps with the flow of language for longer pieces. Besides, reading the text you’ve written can give you a sense of where you’re at in your work, and how much more needs to be completed. For instance, if you left off in the middle of a sentence, what point were you trying to make? If there are grammatical errors, did they happen because you were typing too quickly? It’s also a good idea to read what you’ve written aloud. Speaking is better for catching errors than eyes because verbalizing your prose allows you to spot pronunciation, rhythm, and intonation problems. While reading aloud, you can also hear if your tone is too informal or formal for the audience you are writing for.

7. Avoid Social Media While Writing

Humans are inherently social creatures. So it’s no surprise that we crave a social connection with others. However, the social media world can be a slippery slope for those trying to get back on track with their writing. We must first ask ourselves why we’re on social media. Do we want to connect with more people? Is it an escape from reality? Or, do we just need some distraction? Whatever the reason, there are ways of being present on social media without being mentally present. For example, have a friend or family member share their day on their page and see what they’re doing instead of scrolling through your timeline and seeing posts you’ve made throughout the day. Or try a time-restricted exercise where you limit your usage of social media. Try an app like Freedom , that allows you to block social media pages during specific periods of the day. For example, you may block Facebook and Twitter until 4 PM every day, and enjoy your social media feeds only in the afternoon. This will help you to avoid temptation and save you hours of productive time throughout the month.

8. Split Your Writing Time Into Chunks Of Time

To get into a rhythm and write more, you need to have a schedule. It is vital to plan in time for your work systematically to know when you will be writing. If you want to get the most out of the time that you have scheduled for writing, try splitting up your sessions into chunks of 15-30 minutes. This way, if one period is not productive enough, you can either take a break or just continue with the next session until it’s done. I find that this approach helps me to stay focused and work more productively throughout the day. Consider implementing the famed Pomodoro technique where you usually set a timer for 20 minutes, write as much as you can, and then take a short break. See how many of these quick sessions you’re able to finish in the day and reward yourself for high performance.

9. Give Up Distractions, Take A Break, And Come Back Fresh

Distractions can consist of anything, but they’re mostly about some dopamine-inducing form of entertainment. Escape them and let your mind rest. By taking a break, you can do something that will make you feel better and more focused on your work. Though technology might make it easier to find information, it wastes large blocks of time. If you can’t stop yourself from checking your phone every few minutes, try setting a timer to go off every hour or two and take a five-minute break. Take a hike. There is nothing better than a quick stroll among natural surroundings to enliven your creative spirit. Walk, breathe, and come back to your writing task with a relaxed mind .

10. Find A Routine That Works For You And Stick To It

Many writers are unsure what schedule they should follow to write regularly. They are always looking for tips that are going to help them find their routine . The best thing you can do is get rid of distractions, allowing you to focus on your writing. Use tools like Windows 10’s Focus Assist, which lets you set intervals for shutting off notifications, reminders, and other types of interruptions so you can focus on your writing.

I know how hard it can be to write again after we’ve had writer’s block. It’s hard to find the motivation to keep writing. But all the tips mentioned above will help you find your mojo and get back on your writing track. If you are feeling discouraged or frustrated with your writing, try to take a break. This will give you time to regain your focus and clear your head. Next up, you may want to explore a guide to the best places to write in .

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Help! For Writers: 10 things to do when you can’t think of anything to write

I have written five books – all published by Little, Brown – in the last ten years. They are, in order, “ Writing Tools ,” “ The Glamour of Grammar ,” “ Help! For Writers ,” “ How to Write Short ,” and, coming in January, “ The Art of X-ray Reading .” They are my children, and I love them equally. But in private moments I confess a special affection for the middle child, “Help! For Writers.”

This book has not sold as well as the others, nor do I often hear from readers who claim inspiration from its pages. Yet when I am trying to solve a writing problem, either for myself or others, it becomes my go-to book. (It has, to its credit, inspired a course on Poynter’s News University.)

Here’s how the book works. Help! is divided into seven sections, with each dedicated to a part of the writing process. They are:

• Getting Started • Getting Your Act Together • Finding Focus • Looking for Language • Building a Draft • Assessing Your Progress • Making It Better

For each of those seven steps, I have identified three common problems that almost all writers face. For each of those problems, I offer ten solutions. Do the math: 7 steps times 3 equals 21 problems, times 10 equals 210 solutions.

To make better use of the practical wisdom in this book, Poynter has agreed to feature a writing problem a week – with ten solutions – for the next 21 weeks. When you’re through, you’ll have a condensed version of “Help! For Writers,” a strong lifeline for drowning scribes, and an incentive to reach for the News University course, and – to raise the spirits of middle children everywhere – the book.

Problem: I can’t think of anything to write

1. Spend a morning in a coffee shop or an afternoon in a bookstore For the price of a cup of coffee and a bagel, you can listen in on the morning’s conversations about news and current events; or you can browse through new books and magazines at a favorite bookstore.

2. Keep a little notebook to compile story ideas. Ideas can be elusive – like fireflies at dusk. You need a dozen story ideas for every one you execute. You’ll need a place to store them. Use whatever suits you, including the notes mode on your mobile phone.

3. Read a book on a topic that is unfamiliar to you. By reading such work, you discover not just specialized content but also story ideas that span more than one field of study.

4. Break your routine. Go to work or school a different way. There are stories that come out of Wall Street and others out of Main Street, but don’t get stuck in that false dichotomy. Many stories can be found on the side streets and especially, as Bruce Springsteen reminds us, on the backstreets.

5. Eat out when you can. When people eat, they also laugh, argue, canoodle, whisper, check each other out, check you out, or talk too loud. Pay attention, and never be afraid to turn your listening into a conversation, especially with an interesting stranger.

6. Watch people in their natural habitats. Try the park, the mall, a busy street, the gym, a hotel lobby, a church, a concert hall, a pub, the airport, the bleachers during a high school football game, Dunkin’ Donuts. Ride the bus. Take the train.

7. Read posters, billboards, store signs, graffiti. Drive around and look at the big signs, commercial and governmental. Walk around to see what the small signs say. When you enter an office or someone’s home, look at what’s hung on the walls, or, especially, on the refrigerator door.

8. Read the news for under-developed story ideas. Begin with the small stories, the ones inside the paper, or down into the website. Look for announcements or events you might write about. Scour the classified ads.

9. Interview the oldest person you know — and the youngest. The older human sources are precious – and fleeting. They provide testimony for oral histories, and they embody a set of experiences that can be mined for story ideas, both fiction and non-fiction.

10. Spend the day with a person whose job interests you. There may be no more reliable story form than “a day in the life.” The “day” part of that equation creates an immediate time element. And the “life” part allows the writer to see sources in their natural habitats, observing them in action.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a weekly series that will appear on Wednesdays.

Poynter Journalism Prizes honor excellence in U.S. journalism

Winners and finalists are the first for the contest under the stewardship of the Poynter Institute

Here are the winners of the inaugural Poynter Journalism Prizes

The awards continue a 45-year tradition that was most recently headed by the News Leaders Association.

Opinion | An unsettling look at Donald Trump’s social media rants

The former president’s social media audience has diminished since 2021, but his posts — mostly on Truth Social — have only gotten more disturbing

Shakespeare and the power of wordplay … featuring the pun that launched my career

Four words from Hamlet collide with multiple meanings and offer a stimulant for the brain as strong as the most sophisticated puzzle

Fact-checking Aaron Rodgers, who repeated Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s false claims about HIV/AIDS

Rodgers falsely claimed an antiretroviral drug called azidothymidine, or AZT, to treat HIV was ‘killing people’ in the 1980s

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9 Writers on Why Writing Is So Hard

Best-selling authors talk to Shondaland about what makes their craft so difficult and special.

Every item on this page was chosen by a Shondaland editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

There are few things as magical as reading a book that fully immerses you in a new world. Poetic and profound prose can evoke emotions that can remain with you for your entire life, transforming how you see the world. With that in mind, this month, Shondaland is exploring the world of books, from authors discussing their favorite reads and a publisher explaining the need for more transparency in the industry to a nearly published author sharing what it’s like to be on the brink of putting her first book out into the world. Happy reading!

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “If writing were easy, everyone would do it!” You’ve likely read it a million times, right? Well, there’s a reason for that. You see, everybody has a story to tell. But it’s the actual telling of those stories that separates writers from everyone else yearning to share their tales. That being said, even the most seasoned and celebrated writers will quickly let you know that writing is just downright hard!

So, what is it that actually makes putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) so daunting, and how do you combat that difficulty when trying to write your story? Shondaland caught up with some of our favorite authors to find out. And what they have to say just might surprise you.

Why is writing so hard?

The solitariness of it, the elusiveness of it. If forced, we could generate words, sentences, paragraphs, but it would be meaningless. So, the thing that makes it a story, the words that etch out a character that the reader can see and feel and hear … there’s plenty of tricks to get there. You can create the conditions for that element to come forward, and do what you can to push yourself into that state that makes it happen … but part of it remains mysterious.

Alex Aster (author of Curse of the Forgotten City ) @alex.aster

Writing is so hard because we put so many expectations on our writing, and those expectations weigh down not only our fingers while typing, but also our words. I started writing books when I was 12, which I think saved me from a lot of the fretting about writing that I see so many people struggle with. When you’re a kid, you do what you love just because you love it. You don’t think to yourself, “Will these words be worth the time and effort? Will they turn into a book that will sell for enough money to allow me to pay my rent?” You just … write. As an adult, there are so many constraints on our time, so it’s natural for us not to want to waste it. We don’t have time to simply play the way we used to. Writing is hard because it’s a fluid, organic, almost magical form of creation that we often try so hard to bottle up or cookie-cut so it can be monetized.

Brandy Colbert (author of Black Birds in the Sky ) @brandycolbert

For me, not writing is often harder than writing. I don’t believe you need to write every day, but when I’m in the middle of a project, I either need to be actively thinking about it — working out plots and character arcs in my head — or getting words down on the page. I start to feel antsy and a bit anxious when I’ve taken too much time away from a project, to the point where it’s actually a relief to get back to work.

Sarah Gerard (author of True Love ) @sarahnumber4

It can be hard. It can also be easy and fun. Or fun and hard. Or hard but important, exciting, and fulfilling. We wouldn’t keep doing it otherwise. It’s hard because doing it well matters, because stories matter, and the details matter, and there are often a lot of details. Sometimes they take years to organize. The feelings and ideas and memories that we put into the writing also matter, and are layered, and we can’t force an understanding of them. We can only try to approach them with words, and, as many words as there are to choose from, or create, and despite their myriad iterations, they’re never enough.

John Green (author of The Anthropocene Reviewed ) @johngreen

I think writing is easier than many other things. For me, anyway, it is much easier than talking. But still, writing is difficult for me. Sometimes it is difficult because I do not know what I want to say, but usually it is difficult because I know exactly what I want to say but what I want to say has not yet taken the shape of language. When I’m writing, I’m trying to translate ideas and feelings and wild abstractions into language, and that translation is complicated and challenging work. (But it is also — in moments, anyway — fun.)

Kosoko Jackson (author of Yesterday Is History ) @kosokojackson

For me, the hardest part of writing is deciding what to write about. I have a lot of ideas, but not every idea is a viable idea. Is there a character? Is there a plot? Is there a through line? Is this something I want to spend 18 to 36 months on? Do I know enough to walk through the forest, but not so much that it feels boring to tell the story to myself? Writing is a journey for me that is as much writing a story that will appeal to readers (and my agent and editor) as much as telling a story to myself. What “lesson” am I trying to teach myself? What skill am I trying to sharpen? These are just a few of the questions I ask myself when making a novel, and not every novel has the answers — yet.

Morgan Jerkins (author of Caul Baby ) @morganjerkins

Writing is hard because sometimes — or perhaps many times — the words do not match the imagery of a specific scene that you have in your mind. It feels like there is always something that’s lost in translation as soon as it’s immortalized on the page.

Jonny Sun (author of Goodbye, Again ) @jonnysun

Writing is hard because you are dealing with the infinite. Out of a blank page, there is an unlimited number of possibilities of what to write. And at every scale of writing, this limitlessness exists — it feels like every word is an impossible choice. Every sentence can be written in endless different ways. And the ways those build to say something also exist in a million different permutations. The ideas and the way you structure those ideas are endless — the endlessness multiplies itself.

Chuck Wendig (author of The Book of Accidents ) @chuckwendig

I don’t know. Why is it hard digging ditches? Why is it hard being a god? Writing is somewhere in between both of those. You’re the god of digging ditches. You’re navigating this interstitial terrain between art and craft, between self-actualization and commerce, between empathy and evil. It has all these rules, and almost none of them are true. The work is the work, and the work is sometimes hard. It’s supposed to be easy, and some days it is — ironically, the easy days don’t mean the work was good, and the hard days don’t mean the work was bad. The short answer is, again, I don’t know. Maybe it’s hard because it needs to be hard, because if it were too easy, it wouldn’t really matter.

What do you do when writing gets most difficult?

Megan Abbott (author of The Turnout ) @meganeabbott

Go to a matinee. Take a walk. Read a writer I love. Main thing for me: Step away from the computer.

When writing gets really difficult, I stop writing. But just for a few hours. When words are hard to wrangle, I don’t try to force them onto the page. I have tried before, and the result was just more food for my computer’s trash bin! That being said, when I’m on deadline, I treat writing like any other job that has to be done, regardless of my mood. So, I’ll take a walk, reread something I’ve written that I particularly like (almost to show myself, see, you can make something good; you’ve done it before! ), or watch a movie. Once I’m out of the writing chair for a while, I’m often itching to get back in it to try again.

I do write every day when I’m on a tight deadline, and some days it takes hours just to squeeze out a few words. Sometimes I have to power through and remind myself I can fix whatever is not working in edits, either the next day or down the road. But it’s also important to realize when you need breaks. I’m a big fan of taking in other forms of storytelling, like watching television and films, reading graphic novels, newspapers, and magazines, or even rereading a favorite author’s work. Getting outside for some fresh air or a walk or hike usually helps. Cooking and yoga are also soothing ways for me to reset. Just engaging in activities that don’t require you to stare at a computer screen or notebook are all helpful.

Look at one piece of it at a time, rather than trying to apprehend the entire project. Alternatively, take 10 steps back and apprehend the entire project. Look at a different piece of it. Look at a different piece of writing altogether. Make dinner. Read. Hang out with my partner.

I get so frustrated. I cry. I take a walk. I get really angry at myself for being such a terrible writer. This is stupid! Why am I even attempting this when I am so hopelessly inept at storytelling? And then eventually, I get over myself and write. If there is a way to write without at least occasional weeping and gnashing of teeth, I have not yet found it.

I try to take a step back and evaluate “Is the issue I’m facing difficult or something that I truly don’t know how to solve?” If it’s the former, then that means I’m learning, and I’ve learned to be comfortable in the discomfort and trust my skills. If it’s the latter, then there’s something missing. Maybe I’m not at the skill level I need to be. Maybe I need to read more in the genre or more examples of what I’m trying to accomplish. Writing is as much pen-to-paper as it is refilling the well and learning from those who came before you.

I like to tell myself that it’s only a draft. I have to build a foundation first no matter how bad it is because it’s not meant to be perfect. Other times, I take breaks in between writing sessions. It may be a day, or four. I also have been okay with knowing that not every writing session is going to be easy. There are good days and bad days.

I try to establish rules and boundaries so that the limitlessness feels like a puzzle. Instead of a blank everythingness, defining a container helps to figure out how to use those bounds to express things that feel outside of those bounds, and also helps to figure out when I can break those rules for specific purposes. I also — when faced with indecision — just try to write the bad version, and then revisit later. It’s always easier to edit and have something in front of you that you can improve as opposed to coming up with something when nothing is in front of you.

It depends on when, and why, it’s difficult. If it’s difficult toward the end of a writing day, I give up and go do something else for the day. If it’s at the start, I try to push through. Sometimes it’s a problem in the work, sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s, I dunno, a Thursday on a full moon with a high pollen count. Sometimes the thing to do is go take a walk, get the blood moving. The blood carries oxygen, and the brain needs oxygen, so churn that red stuff, get the idea bubbles bubblin’.

Do you have any advice for fellow writers struggling with their work?

Write badly. Give yourself permission to write badly. We’re always trying so hard to make it good, vivid, real, faithful to the vision in our head … and that’s a lot of pressure. If we give ourselves permission to write one bad page, two bad pages, we can forget all the rest and just churn out words, ideas … and, in the best circumstances, get to see that beautiful unconscious place that leads to good stuff!

The times when writing is most difficult is when I don’t have a plan. Anyone is going to look at an empty page and think, what am I supposed to do to fill it?! So, I recommend always working with some sort of outline. Some might believe it takes the magic out of writing, but what it really does is just gives a writer a place to start … and a direction to go when they’re a little lost. Almost like a map.

I also recommend writing for yourself first. When I began writing at 12, I was just writing the type of book that I wanted to read. Pretend you’re the only one who will ever read it. At least in the drafting stages. That way, you won’t be afraid to take risks.

I think writers could stop being so hard on themselves — myself included. It’s irrational but easy to compare works in progress to finished books on our shelves, and it helps to remember that no piece of writing comes out fully formed. And that every project is different, so it’s best to go into it without expectations and know that you might have to figure out new ways to shape the piece into what you want it to be.

Talk to other writers about it. Meditate on what brings you to the work in the first place, what is important to you at the core of it.

Try to be nice to yourself!

Your journey won’t match anyone else’s, and you should embrace that. Find what works for you and what doesn’t, but don’t be ashamed. I’m a writer who bounces around a lot, but when I settle? I settle. I write so many hundreds of pages of books that will never become real. That’s okay because that’s me. I’m also a messy drafter; that works for me. Don’t be ashamed of what works for you, and embrace what makes you unique.

Write it down. Just write it all down. Set the foundation first before you start sculpting. Who knows? Even the pieces you inevitably discard may help to propel the next plot point or character development. All can be useful if you allow it.

Figure out what you enjoy writing about and the ways you write that make you enjoy writing. It’s less about “write what you know” but more “write what you know you like.” So much is already difficult in this world — it doesn’t help to also make writing something a struggle too. I think it helps to find the topics and structures and ideas that make writing feel exciting and joyful — the writing will still be hard, of course, but if there’s something there that makes you keep wanting to revisit it, over and over, that you still feel excited about trying to figure out, then I feel like that means you’ve found something to continue following.

Write a lot. That’s it, really. Iterate as often as you can. Part of this is, obviously, doing the thing helps you learn the thing, but more specifically it also helps you learn your process and your voice, and in knowing those things, you come to recognize when a difficult writing day is normal — meaning, it’s part of your process, your pattern — and when it is abnormal. Abnormal difficulty can mean you’re not dealing with a writing problem, but rather anxiety or depression or some other neurodivergence, and those are normal and okay but can’t be solved the same way you’d solve an average writing block — you can’t “write your way through” depression. You’ll only sink deeper, like with quicksand. You have to be able to see clearly the difficulties in front of you and see when they belong to your writing process or exist outside of it. Writing a lot helps you get to that kind of clarity.

Scott Neumyer is a writer from central New Jersey whose work has been published by The New York Times , The Washington Post , Rolling Stone , The Wall Street Journal , ESPN , GQ , Esquire , Parade magazine , and many other publications. You can follow him on Twitter @ scottneumyer .

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Why People Can’t Write, and How To Fix That

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Who is to blame for people’s poor writing skills? It isn’t texting or tweeting. It’s a fateful decision made in 1875, from which we’ve never recovered. In this episode, we find out what went wrong — and how today’s educators are reinventing the way writing is taught.

Jason Feifer: This is Build for Tomorrow, a podcast about the unexpected things that shape us and how we can shape the future. I'm Jason Feifer. In each episode, I take something that seems concerning or confusing today and figure out where it came from, what important things we're missing, and how we can create more opportunity tomorrow. Do you think you're a good writer? Maybe you do, so here's another question. Do you think the people around you are good writers, the people you work with, the people you went to school with, maybe, let's be honest, your friends and family? Can these people write. I bet you think the answer is no, and you are not alone.

Voice Clip (Washington Post): It is commonly noted that young people today don't write as well as older generations.

Jason Feifer: That's the first sentence in a Washington Post story. It was written by an English teacher, and it came with the headline, The Real Reason so Many Young People Can't Write Well Today. This concern doesn't just apply to students. It is said about adults too. Back in 2004, the New York Times even ran a story headlined, What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence, and it reported...

Voice Clip (New York Times): Millions of inscrutable email messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests in turn are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion.

Jason Feifer: The piece cited a survey of 120 American corporations, which concluded that a third of employees in the nation's blue-chip companies were bad writers. These businesses were spending more than $3 billion a year on basic writing lessons for their employees. Now, let's be clear about something. In many episodes of Build for Tomorrow, I sat out to prove that a modern concern should not be a concern at all, but here there is no doubt. A lot of people cannot write, even accomplished professionals. You've seen it yourself. These people can barely string a sentence together. Who can we blame for this problem? Isn't that always what we want to know, who is to blame? Here is where it gets interesting. There are, of course, no shortage of fingers being pointed. If you want to hint at where they are pointing, well, you already heard it in that Washington Post story from a minute ago. Here, I'll refresh your memory.

Voice Clip (Washington Post): You people today don't write as well as older generations.

Jason Feifer: The headline said, quote, "Young people can't write well today." We are as always treating this as a today problem.

Voice Clip (John McWhorter): We always hear that texting is a scourge. The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy or at least writing ability among young people in the United States and now the whole world today.

Jason Feifer: That's from a TED Talk by the linguist John McWhorter who, to be clear, is summarizing the criticism of texting, but not endorsing it. You want to hear what an endorsement sounds like? Well, just turn on a report from CBS6 Albany.

Voice Clip (CBS6 Albany): Our kids are texting faster than ever. Teachers are noticing a direct connection between an increase in texting and an increase in assignments handed back with errors.

Jason Feifer: Here's one from NBC News.

Voice Clip (NBC News): Young brains need a lot of external stimuli to develop, particularly from birth to age three, what's known as the critical period. It's during this time that children's neurons are making connections for fundamental skills, such as vision, hearing, and language, but these needs are based on centuries of human evolution, which used to have nothing to do with screens. Consider a child watching a video instead of listening to parents read a book. It's a far different experience for the brain. Rather than kids learning to focus and imagine the story, the device presents everything to them, so certain cognitive to become underdeveloped.

Jason Feifer: on and on it goes like that. Texting, tweeting, reading garbage on the internet instead of Shakespeare, word processors that correct our spelling and even our grammar, pick a modern tool that in some way intersects with reading and writing and you can find it being blamed for the decline in people's ability to write. This feels logical, because when we look backwards at pre-digital generations, we say, "Behold, the beautiful handwritten letters. Look at their timeless works of literature."

Jason Feifer: The older generation, we believe, were simply better writers than we were because writing was a more integral part of their lives, and technology clearly ruined that, which makes sense until you look back at the complaints of those elegant and articulate pre-digital people. You don't actually have to go that far. In the 1970s, Newsweek put it on their cover. It was a cover story that screamed, Why Johnny Can't Write. It claimed that, quote, "The U.S. Educational system is spawning a generation of semi-literates," end quote. But to see the real scope of this, let's go back a lot further to the words of a man born in 1831 who founded the nation and was the editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post from 1883 to 1899.

Elizabeth Wardle: Edwin E.L. Godkin, who was one of the people who decried the illiteracy of American youth, wrote several well-known pieces at the time in which he listed all the evil influences, and that's his term, evil influences on poor writing.

Jason Feifer: This, by the way, is Elizabeth Wardle, a professor of written communication at Miami University in Ohio. I will give her a fuller introduction later because you're going to hear a lot from her, but for now, what were those evil influence of the 1800s?

Elizabeth Wardle: Street slang, the bad writing in newspapers, popular novels, and he very specifically said, quote, "The better the novel, the more evil its influence," the carelessness of teachers, and the failure of our educational institutions. Right there at the beginning, that's a story that has not changed.

Jason Feifer: But it gets even more interesting because this is not one of those things that have just been said since the beginning of time. It's not like a, "Kids these days," thing where you can find thousands of years worth of grumpy old people complaining about the younger generation. No, this complaint about writing has a start date, a specific time, a specific year when the complaints began, when everyone decided that people today simply can't write. It's something Elizabeth stumbled upon as she began her academic career and was trying to understand why so many people are such bad writers.

Elizabeth Wardle: Even when I was writing my dissertation, I was thinking, "How are we teaching writing? Why are we doing that? does it actually work?" I set up a study to see, "What are we doing in this class? Does it work." It didn't work, and then I started reading about, "Why were we even doing it?" That took me back to the 1870s where I realized we've been doing it wrong since 1875, despite knowing that it doesn't work.

Jason Feifer: 1875, it is that specific. What happened then? That is what we're digging into in this episode of Build for Tomorrow. We're going to find the real culprit behind our bad writing, which isn't texting, and it isn't tweeting, and it isn't anything modern at all. Along the way, we will also see whether the past really had better writers than the present, and whether history's most classic writers also wrote some real garbage, and very importantly, how we can finally solve this problem and create better writers now. That is all coming up after the break.

Jason Feifer: All right, we're back. Our ultimate destination here will be the year 1875, but before we get there, let's back up a little further to examine the caliber of writers that came before, because if I asked you to think of writers before the year 1875, who would you think of? I know what you'd think of. You'd think of the greats, Charles Dickens, Jane Austin, Emily Dickinson. We can go back further, John Milton, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Homer, the authors of Greek tragedies. These are the kinds of people who we think of from the past, and we think they were full of more talent than the present, that something about their old times created the kinds of writers that last for generations. I wondered, is that actually true? Because this is an important context for our evaluation of why people cannot write today. I called up a very scholarly man to ask a very silly question. When we think of Shakespeare, we think of amazing writing. We think of, "They don't make them like they used to."

Isaac Butler: Right.

Jason Feifer: This was a person from back when, who was flawless and created these timeless masterpieces. I wondered, did Shakespeare write anything that scholars just consider to be kind of crap? That laugh comes from an old friend of mine named Isaac.

Isaac Butler: Hi, my name is Isaac Butler, and I am a writer and theater director based out of New York.

Jason Feifer: Fans of Slate might recognize Isaac's voice from the podcast Working where he is a co-host or the Culture Gabfest, where he is a regular. Also, if you're interested in acting, Isaac has an amazing new book coming out called The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, which none other than Nathan Lane said was quote, "The best and most important book about acting I've ever read," end quote. Wow. Anyway, Isaac said that yes, scholars generally agree that Shakespeare wrote some crap, three pieces of crap in particular, Timon of Athens, Merry Wives of Windsor, and Henry VII. To be fair though, Henry VII was the last thing Shakespeare wrote, and scholars believe he didn't actually write all of it, probably just part of it. But anyway, it was a real disaster in every sense.

Isaac Butler: There's a part in the play where cannons are fired, and one of them sort of misfired and lit the thatch roof on fire. The whole building burned down. Only one person died, and it actually destroyed the Globe Theater of Shakespeare's Greatest Work and Legacy.

Jason Feifer: So Shakespeare went out with a bang?

Isaac Butler: He really went out with a bang. Yeah.

Jason Feifer: But Isaac said, "Look, this doesn't really answer my question, because if we want to understand whether the past was full of objectively better writing than the present, then we must understand why great writers from the past are considered great at all." Here, Shakespeare actually presents a useful case study, because although none of what we are about to say takes away from Shakespeare's obvious and lasting talent...

Isaac Butler: There's a bunch of different things that had to happen in order for Shakespeare to become Shakespeare. You know what I mean? In order for the sort of deceased, middle-aged playwright to become the greatest writer of all time. One of them is, is that after his death, a group of his colleagues and friends had to get together and publish a folio edition of all of his plays, and they had to decide on what were the sort of quote unquote definitive versions, because many of those plays, there's multiple different versions of them floating around. There's bootleg published versions of them. Authorship did not work the same way in late 16th, early 17th century England that it works today.

Jason Feifer: For example, Shakespeare did not invent the plots of his plays. He stole the plots from other writers, which was fine at the time, totally acceptable, and also, a play back then was never really considered finished. It would be performed, improved upon, revised, performed some more, and this would go on for years. Shakespeare would make his own revisions, but also, and this is so hard to even imagine today, but other versions of his plays would be performed with revisions made by other people which sometimes contained great, new changes that would eventually be attributed back to him. Sometimes they contained not-so-great things.

Isaac Butler: You take a play like Hamlet, there were multiple versions of Hamlet flying around in Shakespeare's time. It's unclear how much of a hand he had in publishing any of them. One of them is in fact called the bad Hamlet by scholars, and there's some debate as to whether it's the bad Hamlet because it's someone reconstructing the play for memory or if it's... You know in the old days where someone would sit in the movie theater with a camcorder and record the... Maybe someone did that and transcribed it. To give you just an example of it, the most famous line of Shakespeare is probably, "To be or not to be, that is the question." In the bad Hamlet, it's, "To be or not to be, that is the point."

Jason Feifer: Just imagine going to Broadway, settling into your expensive seat, and realizing 30 minutes in that, "Crap, we bought tickets to Bad Phantom of the Opera," although let's be honest, isn't Bad Phantom of the Opera just called Phantom of the Opera? Okay. That's reason number one that Shakespeare becomes Shakespeare, because authorship back then was fuzzy and Shakespeare benefited from the best revisions. Then you've got a couple other reasons. For example, British colonialism sure helped, because as the British forced their culture and language upon people across the globe, they presented Shakespeare as the pinnacle of the English language. This created a continued scholarship of his work, which introduced it to successive generations. Also, Isaac says, let's not forget...

Isaac Butler: Everything is timeless until it's not, and there will be a day when these things that we consider great and timeless no longer feel that way anymore.

Jason Feifer: There have been other works by other writers that have been considered timeless or classic or brilliant at points in the past, but then those works ran afoul of changing cultural norms, and they either stopped making sense to people or their jokes or plot points felt too outdated, or they just became offensive. Shakespeare, in fact, has one of those. It's Taming of the Shrew.

Isaac Butler: The misogyny in it is almost impossible to explain away completely. You'll see productions where they try. Once you get rid of that, it's like a bunch of jokes from the 16th century that don't transfer that well.

Jason Feifer: There is a parallel universe in which William Shakespeare is a guy who's very talented, and he's successful during his time, but then he dies and his friends don't put together a greatest-hits version of his work, and the British don't carry that book around the globe, and he just becomes forgotten, like so many peers whose works have been great, but did not survive, or many people whose works were very bad and did not survive. This is true of all time periods. For example, did you know that even as we consider Greek tragedy to be the origin of Western dramatic writing, we actually only have 32 surviving plays?

Isaac Butler: We know of at least 10 writers of Greek tragedy, but only three of those playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides survive. The work of seven of those writers has been completely wiped out.

Jason Feifer: Why did these three writers survive? We know that monks of the middle ages transcribed the surviving plays because it was a good way to learn classic Greek, but why those plays? Why not other plays? Did they just not like them? Were they bad? Even though we know of 10 writers total, surely there were more, dozens, hundreds, thousands of writers all lost a time because... Why? We don't know, but here's what we do know. When we think of the great works of art from the past, we are experiencing a kind of survivor's bias.

Jason Feifer: We see only the great works that survived, sometimes for reasons that had little to do with the great work itself, and we do not see all the regular, forgettable stuff that was indeed forgotten. Greatness is not inherent in a time. Greatness is what survives from a time. Okay. All of that is really a caveat to our larger question, which is, "Why have people spent nearly 150 years complaining that kids today can't write and believing that something about their particular time has ruined the art of writing?" It is now time to turn once again to Elizabeth Wardle with a more proper introduction.

Elizabeth Wardle: I'm Elizabeth Wardle. I work at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where I am the Roger and Joyce Howe Distinguished Professor of Written Communication, and I direct the Howe Center for Writing Excellence that the Howe's endowed.

Jason Feifer: Elizabeth is passionate about writing and how writing is taught, and as we heard before, she has pinpointed the source of our problems. For such a big and what feels like abstract problem, you have a specific date, 1875, in which you identify everything going wrong. The apple of writing is eaten by Eve in 1875. What happens in 1875?

Elizabeth Wardle: Around 1875, the universities started to change. Before that, it was very much an oral tradition. They were not asking students to read or write extensively in their native tongue. It was lots of sort of debate and declamation and all that sort of stuff.

Jason Feifer: That's because the people who went to college before 1875 were... Well, they were pretty much all white, wealthy men who were being educated to be the American elite.

Elizabeth Wardle: People went to college in order to be lawyers, preachers, gentlemen scholars.

Jason Feifer: But then the world started to change. It became more industrial and urban. Work started to look more like we're familiar with work now, with jobs that required specialization, and printing technology became even cheaper, which meant that it was much more possible to access books and to send each other written communications. All of this meant that workers needed to be more literate. To prepare the modern worker for success, universities started to shift as well. They began asking students to write. Harvard right around 1875 created an entrance exam that required writing. Once Harvard did that, other universities followed, and that is when everyone discovered...

Elizabeth Wardle: The students are writing terribly. Why are they writing so terribly? There was this very specific moment where they could have said, "Because we've never taught them to do this." But instead, they said, "Our boys illiterate, and it's the fault of..." Then there was a long list of things it was the fault of. Instead of saying, "They're being asked to do something that we've never asked them to do before, because there was no need. We were in an oral society. When they were reading and writing, it was often in Greek or Latin..." They suddenly had to do a thing they never had to do. Instead of saying, "Gosh, they're learners. We should teach them." They said, "They're lazy. They're stupid. They don't know how to do this. Somebody has failed them. It's definitely not us." They totally missed an opportunity, and we have never recovered from that.

Jason Feifer: I dug through newspaper archives from the time just to see how people failed to understand the problem, and it is pretty amazing stuff. For example, at a gathering of Massachusetts teachers in 1883, the president of something called The Agricultural College stood up to blame, quote, "Too much sentimentalism and too little solidity in common school education these days," end quote. A year later, The Boston Globe ran a story headlined, Better English: Educators Told It Is Time to Improve. This was coverage of another meeting of educators where this time someone from The U.S. Census Bureau stood up and blamed what we would now call political correctness for the problem. Here's what that person said.

Voice Clip (Boston Globe): Teachers who try to select good material are hampered by the antagonism men so generally have towards expressions conflicting with their ideas. Publishers making books for the universal market are compelled to cut out what might offend an adherent of any scientific, religious, or political idea until some books have no moral vitality.

Jason Feifer: In 1892, a Harvard committee that was tasked with solving the writing problem decided that it is...

Voice Clip (Harvard Committee): A little less than absurd to suggest that any human being who can be taught to talk cannot likewise be taught to compose. Writing is merely the habit of talking with the pen instead of with the tongue.

Jason Feifer: But anyway, back to 1875, a minute ago, you heard Elizabeth Wardle say that schools totally missed an opportunity that we never recovered from, and here is what that opportunity was. She is, again, going to reference E.L. Godkin, a newspaper editor who was on the Harvard committee.

Elizabeth Wardle: Instead of saying, "Writing is becoming so complex in this increasingly specialized society, where more people have access to literacy. This is really interesting. Let's study it," he said, "It's remedial, and if you can't do it, then you are a," quote, "idler and lounger," one of his other great quotes, "and you really need a remedial class."

Jason Feifer: A remedial class. Harvard, the committee believed, should be in the business of teaching great literature, not helping students learn how to write. But if Harvard must teach them, then fine.

Elizabeth Wardle: We're going to create a new class called English A, and it is a remedial composition class that will have to be taught by the least powerful people, because who would want to teach a remedial composition class? I guess what we'll do there is fix the most broken of the student writers. Everyone else can just go ahead and go into their other classes. Then in the meantime, we will harass the earlier teachers to try to actually do their job better.

Jason Feifer: That was the solution — the birth of first-year composition, or freshman comp, a class that is still around today, and back then was treated with great disdain. And it gets worse from there. Harvard and other higher ed institutions started blaming K through 12 schools for not teaching students how to write, then K through 12 schools were totally pissed and thought it was really higher ed’s responsibility, and Elizabeth says this tension is still with us today. Because people across time have been so convinced that writing isn't actually that hard to teach, they have always been looking for easier and easier solutions, more versions of freshman comp, and that is in part why something called the theme essay became popular. Now, this is a form of essay that had been around long before 1875. It was basically a writing assignment in which students would write an essay using a very rigid structure around a certain theme. Now, to be fair, lots of people even back then understood this to be a bad idea. Someone named G.F. Graham wrote in 1842 that...

Voice Clip (G.F. Graham): The theme is a form of composition never likely to be of much practical utility in afterlife. A knowledge of theme writing will be of no assistance in writing a letter or a description, neither is it indispensable to the construction of a sermon or a moral treatise.

Jason Feifer: And of course, you might recognize what they’re talking about by now — because theme writing evolved into the five-paragraph essay that so many of us were taught in middle or high school… and then, of course, never ever used again, because G.F. Graham of 1842 was right. Now to be fair, the five-paragraph essay is generally considered to be a fine starting point for teaching kids how to formulate an argument. But the problem is… schools often treat it not as a starting point, but as the end goal itself.

Elizabeth Wardle: I like to talk about it in this way. There's well-structured problems, and there's ill-structured problems. Well-structured problems have one right answer, two plus two equals four. Ill-structured problems do not have a right answer. Every writing problem is ill-structured. There's a bunch of ways you can do it. Some of them will work. Some of them won't. They're more or less effective. But school really likes well-structured problems because they're so much easier to assess. What you've just named there, the five-paragraph theme, is a great example of trying to take the ill-structured problems that always go with writing tasks and make it into a well-structured problem, because I can assess it easily. Do you have five paragraphs? Do you have an intro? Do you have one sentence that names your three points, and do you summarize your three points at the end? That's a well-structured problem. But nothing in the world ever gives you a well-structured problem that you can usually solve with writing,

Jason Feifer: Constructing the form of the essay rather than encouraging students to focus on the content of their argument and then break out of the essay format to better serve the content becomes the goal itself, because of course, writing is hard to teach and hard to grade. Let us be super clear about that. This stuff is hard, but a simple five paragraph form is easy, easy to teach, easy to grade. Elizabeth wants to be clear. This is not a teacher problem.

Elizabeth Wardle: First of all, I never blame teachers. I blame the system. Right? We have been in a system since 1870 that misunderstands writing and misunderstands learning. We are currently in what one of my colleagues calls the accountability regime, which is much more interested in a quick pre and post test that proves you've done your job than actually measuring any kind of meaningful student learning.

Jason Feifer: Which means that a structure of writing becomes emphasized over the actual engaged of writing, which is a nice representative of the problem as a whole. To review, writing was not something we emphasized in education until the late 1800s, and then as soon as we did, we decided that young people were stupid for not having learned something that we did not teach them. Then everyone up and down the education ladder basically pointed their fingers and said, "Hey, you are responsible for teaching writing, not me."

Jason Feifer: We narrowed the task and turned writing into a paint-by-numbers experience that could be efficiently taught and graded, but that had little practical application in the real world, and that limited people's understanding and comfort and curiosity about writing. A dysfunctional system calcified and has been with us for so long that we still haven't managed to purge the mistakes of 150 years. Yet, because this is our way, we also still blame every new generation and every new tool that they have for not living up to the imaginary standards that we ourselves never met. What will solve that problem? That is the section I am going to write for you next, coming up after the break.

Jason Feifer: All right. We're back. Now that we've seen where writing went wrong, how can it go right? I will caveat upfront, this is a subject of massive debate and endless books, and I cannot possibly summarize everyone's thoughts or arguments or TED Talks in the next few minutes. Also, progress has been made, lots of it. In the 1960s and '70s, researchers began studying how writing works and how people learn, and that birthed different fields of academic study and teaching, which in turn has created more progress. Consider what I am about to say as just cracking open a door, the illustrating of what solutions look like.

Jason Feifer: I am going to dig into this from Elizabeth Wardle's perspective because she has been shaping the way writing is taught at Miami University and has seen important results. But to really appreciate what she's doing and why she's doing it, I need to add one more detail to the original sin of writing. As you'll recall, when freshman arrived at college in the late 1800s, and they could not write because, of course, they were stuck in a first-year comp course taught by the lowliest people on campus, people who Elizabeth and her colleagues like to call the sad women in the basement...

Elizabeth Wardle: The sad women in the basement, the faculty wives, whoever was stuck with it were teaching what they knew how to teach, which was often literary genre, so it was probably some sort of literary essay. It is certainly not in any way related to what you're going to be doing in science or engineering or social science.

Jason Feifer: In other words, the first writing courses framed writing as a certain specific thing, a form of communication that looked and felt one way for one audience, for one purpose, taught in one field, and this is the heart of what Elizabeth thinks we need to fix. Not everyone will be great as an essayist. "That is fine," she says. In a specialized world with so many different forms of communication, we need to expand not just how we teach writing, but how we define writing. We're going to look at this in a few ways. First, we'll talk a about how writing is taught in grade school, then we'll move on to what's happening in higher ed, and then how and why to expand the definition of writing. Let's start in K through 12, where again, just to stress, Elizabeth is not blaming teachers. She's blaming the system.

Elizabeth Wardle: What you need to do is help students love reading and writing and don't wreck it for them. Thomas Newkirk has done some really interesting studies about this multimodal drawing that young children do. As they're learning to read and write, they almost always are drawing and writing at the same time. Anything a kid does, it's like a picture, and then maybe whatever word they're learning... which is the world that we're living in, right? Multimodality is everywhere, but there comes a point along the way where you take out the multimodal, and you take out the visual, and you start making them right in these five-paragraph themes.

Elizabeth Wardle: How about if we help them engage in literacy, broadly conceive, really enjoy it, write all the time, use drawing, use all kinds of technologies, and really be excited about it? And it isn't like a thing you do in English class where your teacher corrects with the red pen, because we actually know that's not in fact how you improve. You need to write a lot for real reasons to audiences who are not interested in your errors, but interested in your ideas. I think teachers could do that if the system rewarded them for doing that.

Jason Feifer: In hearing this, I thought back to my own experience. A quick thing about me. I make my living in one way or another as a writer. I write books, magazine stories, podcasts, talks, and back in high school, I even wrote a blog before the word blog existed. This was at members.aol.com for you old-timers, and I wrote for a local music magazine. You might think I excelled at school writing, but no, I did not. I hated writing in school. I found it insulting and infantalizing, and I could find no compelling reason to treat it seriously. That is because of what Elizabeth said above. You need to write for real reasons. To me, writing was a real thing that could reach real people. Who was I reaching in school? I knew that I had an audience of one, and that audience didn't seem to matter. It didn't matter to me.

Elizabeth Wardle: Right. That audience isn't interested in what you have to say. They're looking at errors. It doesn't make any sense because you never say... If you read something in a magazine, you don't say to your friend, "I can't wait for you to read this. You know why? It's error-free." Never.

Jason Feifer: Right.

Elizabeth Wardle: That's not why you're excited about something you read, but that's what we're doing to our students. How about if we get excited about what they have to say and then give them a chance to revise, during which time most of their errors will actually disappear?

Jason Feifer: Elizabeth has a wonderful phrase that she used a bunch when we spoke. It is this, "Writing mediates activity." "That is the point of writing," she says. In the real world, writing is for some purpose. It drives action. But in school, it does not, and that's a problem to fix.

Elizabeth Wardle: I had a student say once, "I've never written to an audience before. I've only written to a rubric." That's terrible. That's horrible. Writing mediates activity. If you are going to give an assignment to your student, what activity is writing mediating? If it's only and ever proving what you know, like, "Okay, there's some places for that, but isn't know more interesting to give them assignments that mirror what happens in the world when writing is mediating activity?"

Elizabeth Wardle: As an example, I had a colleague who was teaching a world religions class, and he's so bored with all these essays that the students are turning in. I said, "Well, where in the world do people actually write about these issues?" He showed me a magazine, Christianity Today. I said, "Do we need to talk about this anymore?" He was like, "No, no. I know what to do." He went back. They all found a magazine. They all wrote articles for the magazine. One of them was the editor. One of them was the layout person. They made a magazine, and then they wrote for real reasons. That was not pseudotransactional. There is no reason that we can't be doing that, but it's not how we're trained to think. We just assign what was assigned to us.

Jason Feifer: And this is a window into the larger thing that Elizabeth is doing at Miami University, which is part of a national movement called writing across the curriculum. The idea is to get professors and students, who are outside the traditional essay-writing English classes, to engage with the idea of writing — to think of what they do as writing. Because the thing is, most people do not think of themselves as writers… even though they’re writing all the time.

Elizabeth Wardle: Lots of my students who say they're not writing, the first thing we do is an inventory, every place you write and all the things you write in a week that have nothing to do with school. They're writing. They're writing all the time. But most of that stuff doesn't even get counted as writing or named as writing. They say, "Yeah, I'm a fan-fiction writer. I write thousands of words a week. I'm not a writer because that's not rewarded in school." If we could help them see all the kinds of writing that matter, they might say, "I'm not a very good essay writer, but I am great at lab reports and fan fiction," then great. Then you don't feel bad because you're not a bad writer. You're better at one thing than another. We teach them that you can always improve because writing is not something you're just born able to do.

Jason Feifer: Where do you think that students' mentality comes from where they don't believe that their writing, even though they are? Well, one answer is obviously 1875, but I'd say it is still being reintroduced and emphasized to every new, successive generation in ways that sound like... Well, let's take a listen to this old thing again.

Jason Feifer: What if the problem, and stay with me here, what if the problem isn't texting? What if the problem is in part at least the belief that texting is a problem? Okay. Let's take this at face value for a moment. Students are texting. Students are writing badly. Is this a correlation or causation? probably correlation because the problem existed long before texting did. But anyway, let's set that aside and look at the situation from a student's perspective. The student texts with their friends. They understand the rules and formats of that mode of communication, and they are rewarded for it with a robust social life.

Jason Feifer: Like Elizabeth says, writing mediates activity. Then they come to school, and writing does not mediate activity. Writing is a task presented with rigid rules where the purpose of the task is to be error-free. To be clear, many of these rules are, of course, important. Grammar and syntax and organizing thoughts is all very important to learn. But always, always, as students are learning these rules, they are begging for an answer to the question, "Why does this matter to me? What will I do with these rules?" The answer, the answer that I got as a student and the answer that I am quite certain many students are getting today, is that they must perform these rules for evaluation, which is not a very compelling answer. The student is taught something, and it is this, writing is a thing that is hard and unpleasant and not relevant to your lives.

Jason Feifer: What does the student do? Well, they continue to write in the ways that engage them. Maybe that's just texting to start, maybe other things. Maybe they write TikTok sketches and song lyrics and fan fiction, but they don't consider any of that writing, and they certainly aren't rewarded for it in school, which means they don't engage with the lessons of communication that they have learned and maybe even taught themselves in this other form of writing that they like, which means they never extract those lessons and discover what parts of them are transferable to other forms of writing, because yes, writing a TikTok sketch actually can inform the way you write other things because that's how writing works. A TikTok sketch teaches you, I don't know, efficiency and pacing and building of inform, but the student will not make that bridge. They will instead consider themselves to be a bad writer because writing is a thing that they were told they're bad at. How do you counter that? It starts by teaching the teachers, and that is what Elizabeth is doing at Miami University.

Elizabeth Wardle: Part of the way that we've done it is by saying, "Faculty, it's not as bad as you think. You can actually do this. We're going to help you. We're going to pay you to come and spend a semester learning what you actually already know." We spend a semester with them. They have to come in teams, because if you come alone, then you're just that one weird person who wants to change everything in your department. They have to come in teams, and then they have to work with teams who are different than them. Part of what we do is have them figure out what they already know about writing and how they use it and see how what they do is different than what the guys in mechanical engineering are doing and then say, "Now, how do you apply this to your own department?"

Elizabeth Wardle: The best example I can give you is that the economists came, and the economists said, "We don't write. There is a writing requirement. We don't like it, and we don't want to do it." The first thing that happened is that we started listing everything that they do in a given week, and they were like, "Yeah. Okay. We write all the time, but a lot of this stuff we didn't really realize was writing because charts and graphs and explanations of charts and graphs, that's writing." As soon as they realized that, they also realized that I and my colleagues in English could not teach that for them because we don't do that. Then they were like, "Wait, this is totally ours to do. We actually don't want you to do it. We need to put it not just in one class, but across every class that we teach." They went back to their department and did that.

Elizabeth Wardle: They created a sequence of courses in their major, where they ensured that in every single class, students understood that what they were doing with symbols in econ was writing and that they needed to get good at it or they would be failures as economists. That's what people need to do. Right? The faculty need to do that. Then when the students do it, what I'm seeing there is that they will say when you interview them, "Well, I'm not very good at writing essays, but I'm a really good geologist, and I'm really good at writing to other geologists and explaining what we've learned. I'm pretty excited about that because I can't be a geologist without doing that." It totally changes everybody's attitude, and I think that attitude's actually half the problem. You think of something horrible that you can't do, and as soon as you realize that's not the case, everything opens up to you.

Jason Feifer: Remember earlier when Elizabeth said that there are two kinds of problems? There are well-structured problems and ill-structured problems. Well-structured problems are the ones that have an answer, a specific, un-disputable, one answer. Two plus two is four. That's it. That's the answer. Ill-structured problems have no singular answer. She said, "Every writing problem is an ill-structured problem." What I like about her work and everything she just described about how she's teaching teachers is that it is an ill-structured solution. It isn't mind-blowing. It isn't some magic formula. It allows for infinite possibility and variation. The great mistake we made in 1875, which we have not corrected today, is that we tried to make a complex problem seem very simple, and this is not a writing problem or an 1875 problem. This is an everything problem. Just look around. This is politics and moral outrages and pretty much every complex problem that gets pinned on a boogieman.

Jason Feifer: In the case of writing, it just happens to be street slang and popular novels in the 1800s and texting and tweeting today. I have said it before on my show, and I will say it again. When we simplify problems, we inhibit our ability to identify meaningful solutions, because if texting is the problem, then the solution is just to get rid of texting. Simple, right? But that doesn't solve the problem. The great lesson of writing is that when you discard all the lazy answers, when you take history into account, when you see that we've been complaining about the same thing for more than a century, when you really start to take seriously the problem, you can find creative and meaningful and ill-structured solutions, solutions that allow for and even embrace all the complexities of the world, solutions that say, "Let's build something for the world we are in rather than the world as we imagine it to be." Solutions are possible. Write it down.

Jason Feifer: That's our episode. But hey, one last thing, we talked earlier in this episode about how crappy writing from the past is often forgotten and all we remember are the great things. Well, I have one more funny reminder of that. It is a teeny-weeny reminder, if you will. I'll tell you more about it in a minute, but first, have you experienced rapid change over the last year? It may sound scary. It may feel scary, but it doesn't have to be. Sign up for my newsletter, which is also called Build for Tomorrow, where I show you how to turn change into opportunity. You can get it by going to jasonfeifer.bulletin.com. Again, J-A-S-O-N F-E-I-F-E-R dot bulletin dot com. If you want to get in touch with me directly, you can do so at my website, jasonfeifer.com, or follow me on Twitter or Instagram. I am @heyfeifer.

Jason Feifer: This episode was reported and written by me, Jason Feifer, sound editing Alec Bayless. Our theme music is by Casper Babypants. Learn more at babypantsmusic.com. The actor you heard reading those old newspapers was Gia Mora. You can learn more at giamora.com. Thanks to Adam Soccolich for production help, to Matthew J. Nunez, whose paper on theme writing was helpful during this research, and to James Cerone, a listener of this show for first turning me on to Elizabeth Wardle's work. This show is supported in part by the Charles Koch Institute. The Charles Koch Institute believes that advances in technology have transformed society for the better and is looking to support scholars, policy experts, and other projects and creators who focus on embracing innovation, creating a society that fosters innovation, and encouraging people to engineer the next great idea.

Jason Feifer: If that's you, then get in touch with them proposals for projects in law, economics, history, political science, and philosophy are encouraged. To learn more about their partnership criteria, visit cki.org. Again, that is cki.org. All right. Now, as promised, when Isaac Butler and I were talking about the idea of survivor bias, which is to say how we associate the past with great works of art, because we never see the garbage that was forgotten, I told him how it reminds me of how so many people will say something like, "The music of the 1960s was so much better than any crap we have today," to which Isaac said...

Isaac Butler: If you're talking about the early '60s, there's also the novelty song movement. There's a period of time where popular music is... (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window? the Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. You would be surprised if you went back and looked at how big the novelty song movement was. There's a few years where it's actually just a fire hose of crap, but that's not what we think about when we think of the '60s. We think of The Beatles.

Jason Feifer: Just to be clear, this reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966.

Voice Clip (The Beatles): (singing).

Jason Feifer: What can you say about that? I guess here's what you can say. It is writing? Not good writing, but writing. Anyway, thanks for listening. I'm Jason Feifer, and let's keep building for tomorrow.

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Why We Hate Being Told What To Do

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• Why Kids Can’t Write

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“He’s very bright, but he just can’t seem to get his thoughts on the page.”

“He just kind of rambles in his essays.”

“She has no idea how to start writing.”

Good writing skills are essential to learning and professional success

These concerns are shared with me by parents of public school students, private school students, neurotypical kids, and neuro-diverse or neuroatypical students (LD) including those frustrated by dyslexia and ADHD/ADD.

I share these parents’ concerns. We all know that writing well is key to our students’ future success, in school and beyond. Writing practice improves critical thinking and reading skills, develops mental flexibility, strengthens problem-solving abilities, enhances oral and written communication skills, and helps students evaluate and remember learned material.

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Why Do I Write Essays Last Minute: Understanding the Psychology Behind It

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Do you ever find yourself waiting until the last minute to write an essay? If so, you’re not alone. 

The last-minute rush is common among college students, regardless of whether they’re in high school, college or completing their Master’s.

Procrastination is a common issue among students when it comes to writing essays. The temptation to pull an all-nighter right before the deadline can be strong, but this often leads to low-quality work and unsatisfactory grades.

You might be asking yourself – "Why can’t I start writing earlier,” Why does it take a looming deadline to motivate me to write" or “How do I break the cycle of last-minute essay writing."

Why do I take so much time to write an essay?

It's normal to take a lot of time to write an essay. However, when it takes too long, it could be because of a lack of motivation, a perfectionism mentality, or a lack of clarity and organization. Instead of writing everything at once, try to break it down into smaller tasks. You'll be surprised by how much you can accomplish in less time.

This article explores the psychology behind why you write essays last minute and offers practical solutions for finishing your essay on time, along with expert insights and first-hand student tips.

Investigating the Complexities of Last-Minute Essay Writing from a Psychological Perspective

You may find it hard to write essays when you have ample time for several psychological reasons. Here are some of the most common reasons and their solutions.

Are you one of those who feel anxious when they try to start an essay early? You set it aside for later, and before you know it, you find yourself rushing to complete it at the last minute, sacrificing the quality of your essay and stressing yourself out unnecessarily.

One of the main reasons why students procrastinate is anxiety.

You may feel anxious because you’re overwhelmed by the essay requirements, unsure how to start, or worried about not earning a good grade. While it’s normal to feel anxious when facing a new task, sometimes it can get out of hand. Anxiety can prevent you from starting a writing task or keep you from finishing it.

Solution: Break the essay down

Try breaking down the essay into smaller, manageable tasks to overcome anxiety.

Start by identifying key components of the essay, such as the introduction, body, and conclusion. Then, focus on each section at a time and aim to complete it before moving on to the next.

“Dividing a challenging essay into smaller, more achievable tasks has been a game-changer for me. By taking it one section at a time, I feel less overwhelmed and more in control of the writing process,” says Jeremy, a Master’s student.

Making a detailed outline of your paper beforehand will also be helpful, as this will reduce anxiety once you start writing.

2. Fear of failure

Another common cause of last-minute rush is the fear of failure. You may worry that you won’t be able to write a good essay or that your writing won’t meet your professor’s expectations. 

This can be particularly problematic for perfectionists or those with very high expectations.

Solution: Change your mindset

To overcome this fear, it's important to change your mindset from "I must succeed" to "I will do my best." Recognize that making mistakes is a natural part of the learning process and that getting feedback from your professor can help you improve.

While changing your mindset is more of a long-term solution, what do you do when time is running out, and you’re crippled with fear? You turn to an online essay writing service such as Writers Per Hour .

Our team of experienced writers is committed to providing you with timely delivery of 100% original and plagiarism-free essays. We offer more than just research and writing services – our experts can also edit and rewrite your paper to meet your specific requirements.

If you are pressed for time, our fast essay writers are available to deliver papers within 24, 16, 8, or even 5 hours, ensuring that you meet your deadlines without compromising quality.

3. Chronic procrastinator 

The inability to manage time effectively is another common reason behind last-minute essays.

If you’re stuck in the habit of delaying tasks until the last minute, you may find it hard to write your essays on time. Maybe you’re the type of person who derives their motivation from the deadline panic!

Solution: Utilize time-management tools and techniques

If you’ve been asking yourself, “ How do I stop procrastinating on my writing assignments? ”

The solution is to start writing an essay as soon as it’s assigned. Try using time management techniques like the Pomodoro method— working for 25 minutes and taking a break for 5 minutes.

Also, utilize time-management tools like a planner, a calendar, or a daily to-do list to help you stay focused and motivated. This can help you complete tasks within a specific time frame to avoid procrastination.

“I've found that creating a detailed to-do list is an effective way to beat procrastination and stay on track. Break down your essay into chunks and set specific deadlines for each one. This will help you stay motivated and focused and avoid the temptation to put off the work until the last minute,” advises Anne, our expert writer.

4. Perfectionism

Perfectionism is the enemy of progress in many cases. While it’s natural to want to do your best, perfectionism is a trap that can prevent you from starting or even completing tasks.

Wanting to submit a perfect essay can lead to overthinking, rewriting, and delaying the final product. Remember: submitting an imperfect essay on time is better than submitting a perfect one late.

Solution: Set realistic standards

The solution for perfectionism is to set reasonable standards for your work and be willing to accept feedback.

It’s essential to understand that writing is not a one-shot attempt but a process that involves continuous improvement. Revising papers is also a regular part of the writing process. 

Remember that making mistakes is natural, so instead of striving for perfection, aim for progress.

5. Task aversion

Sometimes, you may find yourself in a time crunch due to sheer task aversion. You may simply not enjoy writing essays or find the task tedious. You may also find the essay topic challenging, or you may not be feeling confident in your writing skills.

Solution: Make it enjoyable

To overcome task aversion, try finding ways to make essay writing more enjoyable. For instance, you can choose a topic that interests you, write in an inspiring environment like a coffee shop, or reward yourself after completing the essay.

If the essay topic is very challenging, consider seeking help from professors or tutors for a fresh perspective and guidance.

6. Lack of preparation

Another reason for writing essays last-minute is lack of preparation. Maybe you don’t understand the essay requirements clearly, or simply underestimate how much time it will take to complete.

For instance, if you are tasked with writing a ToK exhibition paper on a complex topic, you may not realize that it requires a lot of research and analysis beforehand, leading you to leave it until the last minute.

Solution: Prepare well beforehand

To combat this, take time to read the essay prompt thoroughly, research the subject matter, and brainstorm ideas before diving in.

Identify and bookmark all the relevant sources you’ll use for reference when you start writing. Also, take down notes as you research to avoid cramming.

Once you’re well prepared, set aside specific times to work on your essay and break it down into smaller manageable steps.

7. Uncertainty

Writing a full essay can be an uphill task if you’re uncertain how to approach it. Maybe the topic sounds quite unfamiliar, or you don’t understand some aspects of the essay prompt.

When you don’t know where to start or feel overwhelmed by the task, it’s easy to put it off until the last minute.

Solution: Reach out for clarity

To overcome uncertainty, you can always write to your professor, asking for clarification. They’ll certainly help you understand any confusing aspects of the assignment.

Alternatively, you can discuss the essay prompt with your classmates to get their perspectives before you dive into writing.

“ I remember one time when I was really struggling with an essay assignment. I just couldn't seem to wrap my head around the essay question, and I was feeling very unsure about how to proceed. Finally, I decided to approach my professor and ask for help.

My professor was incredibly understanding and supportive. She took the time to walk me through the essay question and provided me with some helpful resources that I could use to research and write the essay.

Thanks to her guidance and support, I was able to kickstart the essay with confidence, ” shares IB student Mark.

8. Lack of interest in the topic

Let’s face it: some topics just aren’t interesting to write about! If the subject matter of the essay doesn’t appeal to you, it can be tempting to put it off until the last possible moment.

However, you’ll only end up cutting it close, which is a recipe for disaster.

Solution: Make correlations

To address this issue, find a way to relate the topic to your personal interests or career aspirations.

Can you connect it to a current event or a larger societal issue you care about? Is there any way the topic impacts you directly or indirectly? Writing an essay can be much easier if you can relate to the topic in real life.

9. Fear of negative feedback

Sometimes we procrastinate because we fear receiving negative feedback or criticism of our work. While it's natural to want to avoid harsh criticism, remember constructive feedback is essential for growth and improvement.

Solution: Embrace feedback

Instead of being afraid of negative feedback, embrace it as an opportunity to learn and improve your writing skills .

Reach out to your professor, family, or friends for feedback and ask for specific areas you can improve on. Then, incorporate that feedback to improve your essays and boost your confidence in writing.

10. Poor prioritization

Finally, poor prioritization and time management skills can cause us to procrastinate essays until the eleventh hour!

Maybe you’ve wondered, “ What's wrong with me that I can't manage my time better? "

When you have a lot on your plate, putting off the most unpleasant tasks until the last possible moment can be tempting. You may find yourself prioritizing other tasks (e.g., socializing or watching Netflix) over your essays.

Solution: Learn to prioritize

To curb this issue, learn to prioritize tasks and write down a daily priority list from the most important to the least important tasks.

Set realistic deadlines for each task and stick to them, giving yourself reward breaks after completing every task.

How to stay awake to write an essay?

If you want to stay awake to write an essay, drink lots of water and eat healthy snacks like fruits and nuts to keep your energy levels up. Also, take small breaks occasionally and stretch your legs to improve blood circulation. Finally, listen to some upbeat music and drink a cup of coffee to stimulate your brain and improve concentration.

Now you have it! If you’ve been wondering why it’s so hard to start your essays on time, you could be a victim of one or two of the above culprits.

Waiting for the last-minute rush is a bad habit that can lead you to earn poor grades. Fortunately, procrastination is a habit that can be broken, though it takes time and effort.

By understanding the psychological reasons why we procrastinate, you can implement effective strategies to help you overcome the last-minute syndrome. Ultimately, you’ll become a more productive and confident essay writer.

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What students lost since cursive writing was cut from the Common Core standards

Michel Martin

Gurjit Kaur

NPR's Michel Martin speaks with historian Drew Gilpin Faust about her story in The Atlantic , "Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive."

: [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: This story incorrectly states that the U.S. government removed cursive from “Common Core” standards. In fact, the common core standards are set by a group of governors and school officers from the around the country, not the federal government.]

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Now, I know I'm dating myself, but do you remember when you learned cursive? If yes, then you remember learning how to link your letters together just so and to keep them all nicely spaced, probably with the help of those preprinted lines. But if the answer is no, then you are the reason we are having this conversation. This is not throwing shade. It is a fact that in 2010, the U.S. government officially removed cursive from the required Common Core Standards for K-12 education. And frankly, with laptops and tablets replacing paper, the need to learn to keyboard has become more important. So the ability to read and write cursive has been fading from American society. But this matters because many of the most important historical documents in the U.S., everything from the Declaration of Independence to the Bill of Rights, are written in cursive. And our next guest says something is lost when people can no longer read these founding documents for themselves.

In an essay for The Atlantic, historian Drew Gilpin Faust writes, we will become reliant on a small group of trained translators and experts to report what history, including the documents and papers of our own families, was about. Now, in addition to being an historian, Drew Gilpin Faust was the first woman to serve as president of Harvard University. And she is with us now to talk about her article, "Gen Z Never Learned To Read Cursive." Drew Gilpin Faust, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.

DREW GILPIN FAUST: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

MARTIN: So in your article, you talk about a moment when you were teaching, and you realized that two-thirds of your class couldn't read cursive and even more couldn't write cursive. Could you just remind us, what happened?

FAUST: Well, I was teaching a class, a seminar for undergraduates at Harvard, Civil War history. And a student was giving a report to the class about a book he'd read. And he said one of the great attributes of the book is it had many wonderful illustrations, including illustrations of documents from the Civil War era. But, of course, he couldn't read those because he didn't read cursive. And I said, what? What? Wait a minute. What do you mean you can't read cursive?

And then it turned out that two-thirds of the students in the class couldn't read cursive. And I was just stunned. I had no idea. So I set out to explore some of the implications of that for historians and for history, because I am a historian, but also more broadly, just what it means when you can't read your birthday card from your grandmother and you have to have your mother translate it for you.

MARTIN: Talk a bit more, if you would, about why you think it's important for people to know how to read and write these documents for themselves, because you can imagine where some people will say, well, look, you know what? There are only so many hours in the day. Something has to give.

FAUST: Well, I didn't mean my essay to be a call for the restoration of cursive. I think that's not happening. But I did want it to alert people to the fact that cursive is and almost has disappeared and also to explore, what does that mean? And what do we lose, and how do we think about losing that? And so when we can't read documents from the past, then the past is presented to us indirectly. I mean, just imagine if you had some kind of contract that you had signed and you couldn't read it and someone told you, well, this is what's in the contract. That's what's in the contract. And then later you might find that it was something else. So there are limits in your power, in your sense of how the world works and your sense of how the world used to work when you can't have access to a means of communication.

MARTIN: You write in your piece about some specific handwritten documents that, in your words, tell stories that their creators neither intended nor understood. Would you just tell us a bit more about one of them?

FAUST: Well, I had a document that I discovered. I was writing a biography of a Southern planter from the early 19th century, someone who owned a plantation with hundreds of enslaved workers. And he kept meticulous records on these workers in a birth and death book where he would list births. And also, when he acquired enslaved workers from elsewhere, he would list them, too. And as I was going through all this and trying to recreate the links of enslaved people's family ties and so forth, I discovered that a young boy was acquired who's named Sam Jones. And James Henry Hammond, this planter, changed his name to Wesley because he wanted him to work in the house, and he thought Wesley was a more elegant name. And then 30 years later, I found that Wesley was recorded as having a son, and he named that son Sam Jones.

This is all in handwriting. And so James Henry Hammond, the planter, is telling this story that he thinks is just a record, you know, kind of an economic record of births and deaths of this human property. But one can see the retention of this family tie and this identity by this enslaved person, a young boy named Wesley, who rejected being named Wesley in some deep sense and kept his own sense of his Sam Jones-ness and passed it on to his own offspring 30 years later. And so today, I say in the article, we can still say Sam Jones's name, because this written documentation that the planter was unaware of the meaning of what I was able to stumble on 150 years later.

MARTIN: But I also thought what you said about personal documents, like I can remember, you know, when my own father passed away and I found among his effects letters that he and all of his brothers had served in the military. And they wrote letters to each other promising to take care of their future families or their families, because at that time, none of them had kids, if something should happen to them. And I - in this beautiful cursive handwriting. And it never occurred to me that my children might not be able to read that, you know what I mean?

FAUST: Exactly. Exactly. It does separate you from what has come before in a - both a very personal and individual way, but also in a larger way. As a society, it separates us from what has come before and understanding our origins and the meanings of them.

MARTIN: But you feel really strongly that that you are missing something that you could not learn from a typed version of it. You feel strongly that you don't get the same meaning from it.

FAUST: Well, first of all, you would want to make sure you entirely trusted whoever was typing it. That's one of my points is, is, how do we translate this? And who is the translator? And if someone wants to distort the past, they could present documents in inaccurate ways or leave out certain words. So there's that aspect of it. But then there's something else about documents that has always been thrilling for me as a teacher of history, which is when you take a student to see a document, those documents can be thrilling because you see a link with the past. I mean, we today are thrilled to get signatures from people. We stand in line outside rock concerts and World Series games because that piece of paper says this person touched this paper. This person is linked to me through this paper.

MARTIN: I imagine you've gotten a bit of a reaction to the article, especially I'm thinking about the uproar at the time when cursive was dropped from the Common Core requirements. Were there any interesting reactions to your piece that you wanted to tell us about?

FAUST: Yes. Well, I've gotten wonderful reactions, just people telling their own stories about what handwriting's meant to them or saying there are things that I didn't talk about that they think are really important about handwriting. It develops discipline or it develops fine motor skills or, you know, other laments about what's been lost. But some people have sent me really adorable stories.

One of my favorites is a story about a man who found that in a sort of free inquiry part of an elementary school class, the class was able to do something of their choice related to learning during a certain segment of the day. One little girl was bringing in cursive workbooks. And there was this little clutter of little girls who were teaching themselves cursive. And he mused, he wondered whether it was a cult or an organizing unit or what. But somehow these children wanted to learn cursive and took it upon themselves to teach themselves, even though it's no longer in the curriculum.

MARTIN: A cult of future historians. I think we could do worse.

FAUST: Oh, that must be it. That must be it. They're getting ready.

MARTIN: That was Drew Gilpin Faust. She is an American historian, a former president of Harvard University. We're talking about her essay for The Atlantic, "Gen Z Never Learned To Read Cursive." Drew Gilpin Faust, thanks so much for talking to us.

FAUST: My pleasure. Thank you.

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Why Can’t College Students Write Anymore?

Writing skills are in decline among students today.

Posted February 21, 2014

Is it just me, or are student competencies like basic writing skills in serious peril today? Granted, I am about a decade in to my teaching career , but even within this fairly short span, I have noticed a startling decline in the quality of written work turned in by my students, regardless of which institution (community college, private, four year school) the papers are coming from.

It’s not just that students aren’t demonstrating critical thinking skills in their writing, basic competencies like proper syntax, spelling, and even proper structure like paragraph indentation and how to cite sources are being done very poorly. Teachers have been reporting anecdotally that even compared to five years ago, many are seeing declines in vocabulary, grammar, writing, and analysis (e.g. Westin, 2013; Bloomberg News, 2012). Moreover, on an international scale, our standards in literacy is similarly on the decline (McGuire, 2014).

There are only so many times you can correct a “their” that is meant to denote “there” before wondering, when was the last time this college student’s writing abilities were actually assessed ? As a psychology professor, I am starting to feel like an English instructor, because so much of my feedback on these papers is focusing on such basic writing skills, that the coherency or theoretical merit behind the content is getting lost in the shuffle.

While it is all too easy to sweep this problem under the rug (“just assign fewer papers!” my friends quip when I share my frustrations regarding grading), or blame technology yet again for erosion of yet another significant skill among our youth, I fear that something deeper is amiss here. In the digital world where language is reduced down to 120 characters or less, is some essential part of ourselves that needs to be cultivated to express ourselves clearly through the written word, also being lost in the shuffle? I mean, it isn’t just that students can’t write that is the problem, in digging deeper, I wonder, what else may be lacking in the consciousness of my students today that I and my cohorts were able to draw on when we were students before them?

Bloomberg News (2012). Report: U.S. Teens Report Decline in Writing Skills. Houston Chronicle: U.S. & World. Retrieved on February 21, 2014 from: http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/nation-world/article/Report-U-S-te…

McGuire, J. (2014). Teaching of basic literacy skills is being eroded in our schools. South China Morning Post: Life. Retrieved on February 21, 2014 from: http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/family-education/article/1399083/teaching…

Westin, S. (2013). Social media eroding skills? The Inquirer, Philly.com. Retrieved on February 21, 2014 from: http://articles.philly.com/2013-04-06/news/38329753_1_social-media-fifty-four-students-grammar

Copyright Azadeh Aalai 2014

Azadeh Aalai, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Psychology at Queensborough Community College in New York.

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Opinion Why Americans can’t write

Natalie Wexler chairs the board of trustees for the Writing Revolution.

It's no secret that many Americans are lousy writers. Just ask any college professor or employer , including those at prestigious institutions. With the advent of e-mail , writing ability has become more important than ever, and writing deficiencies have become increasingly apparent.

Surely one reason so many Americans lack writing skills is that, for decades, most U.S. schools haven't taught them. In 2011, a nationwide test found that only 24 percent of students in eighth and 12th grades were proficient in writing, and just 3 percent were advanced.

If students get writing assignments at all, they’re usually of the “write about how you feel” variety. There’s value to that kind of exercise, but it doesn’t provide kids with the tools they need to write analytically.

The Common Core education standards, adopted by more than 40 states and the District, attempt to address this deficit. They require that students learn to write fluently about the meaning of what they’re learning — not just in English class, but also in history, science and maybe even math class.

That makes sense: When students put what they’ve read into their own words, they’re more likely to absorb and retain it. And learning to write clearly requires learning to think clearly.

But the authors of the Common Core focused just on the skills that students should have at each grade level, not on how to impart them. And few teachers have been trained to teach these writing skills, apparently because educators believe that students will just pick them up through reading. Obviously, most don't.

The standards also assume students in middle and high school already know the rules of capitalization, punctuation and sentence construction. But that’s often not the case, especially in high-poverty environments.

Faced with high school seniors who can't compose a simple sentence, teachers may throw up their hands when confronted with an English language arts standard saying their students should "use appropriate and varied transitions and syntax to link the major sections of the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships among complex ideas and concepts."

You have to learn to add before you can do calculus. Similarly, before students can write a coherent five-paragraph essay, they need to learn to write a decent sentence — no matter what grade they’re in.

That doesn't mean teachers should drill students on grammar rules, an approach that research has shown doesn't actually work. Instead, they can ask students to decide whether a group of words is a sentence or a fragment — not an easy distinction for many to grasp.

Once students understand the concept of a sentence, they can learn to use conjunctions such as “but” and “because.” Then they can create complex sentences — including those beginning with subordinating conjunctions such as “although” or “despite” — to introduce variety into their writing. Generally, students need to learn how people write as opposed to how they speak.

When students have a basic grasp of sentences, then — and only then — should they move on to planning and drafting paragraphs. Once they can write paragraphs, they can tackle essays.

The Common Core's failure to acknowledge that many older students lack basic writing skills can have counterproductive results. For example, the Education Trust recently studied more than 1,200 middle school writing assignments to see whether they aligned with the Common Core and faulted them in part because they didn't require students to write at length.

"In grades six to eight, we must see extended writing — multiple cohesive paragraphs that clearly reflect strong organization and style," the report's authors lamented.

But if middle and high school students are writing poorly constructed sentences, they’ll almost certainly end up writing poorly constructed essays. And while the Common Core demands that students engage in critical thinking, sentence-length assignments can fulfill that mandate as well as longer ones.

For example, a teacher can give students the beginning of a sentence based on a text and ask them to finish it using the conjunction “but,” requiring them to examine the text closely enough to find two contrasting ideas. That gives the teacher a manageable opportunity not only to correct writing mistakes, but also to uncover what students haven’t understood. A teacher confronted with an essay full of mechanical and conceptual errors may not know where to begin in correcting the essay.

It’s understandable that educators and policymakers feel a sense of urgency about getting students to write at length in the upper grades. But if we keep expecting students who can’t construct decent sentences to magically produce coherent essays, we’ll remain a nation of lousy writers forever.

Read more on this topic:

Natalie Wexler: If students can’t they write, how can they learn?

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It’s 25 years since Columbine. This is why I can’t leave the story behind

On 20 April 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold drove to Columbine High School in Colorado and murdered 12 students and one teacher, injuring 21 others. I was one of the first reporters on the scene, and spent 10 years writing Columbine, an examination of the massacre. This preface for a new edition marks the 25th anniversary of the shooting

H ow could I have known I was writing an origin story? Mass shootings didn’t start at Columbine High School , but the Mass Shooter Era did. The killers’ audacious plan and misread motives multiplied the stakes and inspired wave after wave of emulation. I’ve tried to leave this story so many times, but a diagram I have created of Columbine-inspired attacks torments me, ruthlessly expanding like an unstoppable spider web, devouring all the lives and futures in its path. It demands we address the cause. More than fifty ensuing shooters have taken nearly three hundred lives and wounded over five hundred more, and every shooter on that page left evidence they were inspired or influenced by the attack at the centre. And a 2015 investigation of Columbine copycats by Mother Jones found more than two thwarted attacks for each one that succeeded. It identified fourteen plotters targeting Columbine’s anniversary, and thirteen striving to top its body count. Surviving mass shooters have admitted they are now competing with each other. Twenty-five years later, Columbine haunts our present and our future, with no end in sight.

The connections keep multiplying, and all roads lead back to Columbine . The Arapahoe High gunman studied the Columbine and Sandy Hook attacks; the Sandy Hook shooter researched the Northern Illinois University (NIU) shooting and was obsessed with Columbine; the NIU killer studied Columbine and Virginia Tech, where the shooter described wanting to “repeat Columbine” and idolised its “martyrs”. Five generations of fallout, and they’re all re-enacting the legend that set it in motion.

The legend of Columbine is fiction. One of the working titles for this book had been The Other Columbine, because there are two versions of the attack: what actually happened on 20 April, and the story we all accepted in 1999. The mythical version explained it all so cleanly: a pair of outcast loners from the Trench Coat Mafia targeted the jocks to avenge years of bullying. Supervisory special agent Dwayne Fuselier, who led the FBI’s Columbine investigation, is fond of quoting HL Mencken in response: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Fuselier warned how appealing the myth might sound to social misfits, but he could not foresee the power of social media five years before Facebook was born. Decades later, a perverse fandom has recast the Columbine killers as champions of the nobodies.

Eric Harris ridiculed the nobodies. Neither he nor Dylan Klebold were loners, misfits, or outcasts. They were not in the Trench Coat Mafia. They were not Nazis or white supremacists, and they did not plan the attack for Hitler’s birthday. (An ammunition problem delayed it a day.) So much of the legend hinges on bullying, but the killers never even mentioned it in the vast trove of journals, web posts, and videos they left to explain themselves. They both did enjoy violent movies, industrial music, and video games, but there is no evidence any of that played a role.

They did not target jocks, Christians, or African Americans. They targeted no one. They shot randomly and designed their bombs to kill indiscriminately. They mocked earlier school shooters and would have been horrified to find their attack immortalised as a mere shooting. That was supposed to be the “fun” part, but the bombs were the main event: hundreds dying in the burning wreckage before the first shot.

Their bombs failed. Yet the legend made them heroic to their progeny and gave birth to a sprawling fandom. By the tenth anniversary, I was encountering a small band of “Columbiners” online. They soon gravitated to a new name, “True Crime Community” (or TCC), to include more mass killers, but Eric and Dylan remain the megastars.

I hear from them constantly, because this book made me enemy #1 – for portraying Eric and Dylan as ruthless killers, who murdered other kids for their own petty agendas. The TCC have migrated over time from blogs and online forums to YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, and smaller apps. They’re highly active on Instagram and Twitter today. (I encounter them only on the apps I use.) I’ve watched the groupies multiply, as fresh crops of teens join their ranks each season. Initially, most were just interested in criminology, or they were amateur sleuths fascinated by the criminal mind. Many still are. But within a few years, vast numbers of new arrivals were unabashedly calling themselves fans. They use the killers’ faces as icons, extol their virtues, and compose love poems, fan fiction, and gory memes. Many twist the story to cast the murderers as victims, while the dead, wounded, and traumatised become villains. When I discussed the TCC on CNN in 2019, I observed that nearly every profile stated either “I condone” or “Do not condone”. But the condones gradually grew so ubiquitous that it became a given, and few bother anymore.

In 2016, a girl tweeted: “hey @DaveCullen block me or else i shoot my school.” I checked her Twitter feed, and she’d been ranting for hours, posting pictures of school shooters, and tweeting: “It’s also something a lot of people need, To die....I wish i was dead...I LIKE VIOLENCE...I want to be killed in front of an audience. . . . I think someone failed to abort me (:”

In 2012, a kid left a jarring comment on a random YouTube video I’d posted about my new apartment: “Hello mr. cullen, Um I have a question on columbine. Now i recently got expelled from school for writing that i was going to killl every one.” While I waited to hear from the FBI, I decided to see if I could clarify his threat level. “That sounds like a rough situation,” I replied. “Why did you say that? Did you mean it?”

He said he was a fourteen-year-old boy with autism and ADHD, who recently got expelled from his middle school on Long Island. “I wrote that i was going to shoot every one in school and i also wrote that i was going to Slit this girls throat if she talked to me,” he wrote. “I know it was stupid but i get so angry because i get lonley, And annoyed at people for leaving me alone. But i dont get bullied. Its just i fell left out.”

So many versions of reality there. His principal and the local cops added another: they told me he was a troubled kid with a rough home life and extreme boundary issues – but a great heart. He was desperate for affection and had no clue how to express it.

We in the media created the Columbine myths by leaping to conclusions way too soon. We tried to correct them later, but there’s no eraser on the internet. The groupies are now the carriers, spreading the Legend of Dylan and Eric to remote reaches of the globe. They seem to number in the tens of thousands — a tiny fraction of the population, but a magnet for a dangerous cohort of marginalised, disaffected, and hopeless teens — a frequent pool of aspiring shooters. Adam Lanza obsessed over the Columbine killers and spent years immersed in these groups celebrating them as folk heroes. Then he murdered twenty little kids and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Here’s the twist: many of the TCC don’t really mean it. I mostly block them now, but I’ve chatted online with hundreds over the past few decades, some at great length. Most describe themselves as awkward outcasts, desperate to fit in somehow — and the fandom feels cool. It’s heartbreaking to hear these kids describe the pain they endure at school every day and the affinity they feel for “Dylan” and “Eric”, the fictional characters they’ve constructed.

When I’ve engaged deeply with TCC kids, the word they nearly always use is cool. “I was just trying to look cool.” I get that, I say – but had they realised that most of the other TCC were just posing too? Never. They believe the others really are badass; it’s only them putting up a front. The typical TCC bravado seems comically obvious to me now, but it probably wouldn’t have been at sixteen. Was it obvious to Adam Lanza? He died in his attack, so we’ll never know. We do know that right now, a distraught and lonely kid is contemplating an attack, and this vibrant community insists it condones Columbine and its progeny. It glorifies its selfish inclinations as noble and heroic.

Actual shootings unnerve the TCC. Their postings grow quiet, respectful even, after a tragedy. I feel the change instantly, as the harassment stops cold, for a week or two. The 2018 Parkland shooting, in which 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Florida, was different. It was six months before the taunts began trickling back in, and I haven’t gotten a death threat in the six years since.

Why? There’s no way to be certain, but my educated guess is that survivors David Hogg, Emma González, and the rest of the March For Our Lives kids were suddenly much cooler than the young men shooting at them. And so much more powerful.

Here’s another reality check: Eric and Dylan weren’t powerful — their plan failed. Every element fizzled: the car bombs, the diversionary bombs, and the cafeteria bombs designed to trigger the carnage; no burning wreckage meant no stampede of fleeing survivors to mow down. The cops wouldn’t even kill them in a final blaze of glory. Eric and Dylan came to miserable ends under ghastly conditions after every attempt to salvage their mission had failed. But their fans, oblivious to the full story, regard them as champions.

The Columbine effect has gone global. It has inspired mass shootings in Finland, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Russia – and knife and axe attacks in places as remote as Siberia.

I can tell when the TCC colonises a region, because I get a flurry of taunts in a new language. It’s social contagion. My biggest surprise has been how little most of these groupies know about the murderers over whom they obsess. They keep repeating the same misreporting that was debunked decades ago.

In the final pages of my book, I sought to convey just how pathetic and gruesome the killers’ final moments were. That’s what their fans need to hear: the ugly truth. Who wants to celebrate failure? Or emulate it?

The Columbine groupies have no idea they’re exporting a fraud. They need to confront the selfish motives and the dismal fate of their “champions”. Legends are challenging to dismantle, but truth is on our side.

• US school shootings
• The Observer
• US gun control
• Parkland, Florida school shooting

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