The Writing Experience
In my own experience, I've always found that writing assignments are more open to interpretation. Instead of having a specific problem with an answer that is easily marked right or wrong, there's an open-ended question that allows the student to think and expand upon their ideas or opinions. That, in turn, requires the teacher to take a more in depth approach to grading. Both the teacher and the student must consider the plausibility of an answer instead of simply regurgitating facts. In a writing class, very rarely is there a definitive solution or one word response.

I suppose in some English classrooms, as was noted by a good majority of students in the video, the teachers focus mainly on sentence structure and grammatical errors (the correctness approach), which we noted as being "easy to grade." However, I wonder if these methods are followed because of this fact, or if the teacher simply hasn’t thought to approach writing in another manner. Still, I think that even when following the correctness approach, some attention is given to content.

One girl noted that if a paper was assigned for a history or science class, she would always sit down the night before and write it. Another student said that in his Social Studies class, he could basically write a list of facts that he knew, and that would be a perfectly acceptable response. Both students assumed that because the paper was for a discipline other than English, it wouldn't be graded as carefully, and sadly, they were probably right. As indicated by the students, outside of a class where composition skills are taught, the teacher tends to pay less attention to form and focuses more on facts.

While it’s important to have true information in your essays, it’s equally as important to have a sense of structure and flow, and this is why a writing class is important to students, no matter which career they may eventually decide to pursue. One girl struggled to think of any profession in which writing skills wouldn’t be necessary. Without this, writing is senseless.