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American education will never realize its potential as an engine of opportunity and economic growth until a writing revolution puts language and communication in their proper place in the classroom .... Of the three "Rs," writing is clearly the most neglected.
-National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, 2003
The Impetus for Change in Writing Instruction
Why do so many English teachers, college professors, job recruiters, and supervisors in the workplace believe that the writing aptitude of young people across the United States is far below acceptable standards? The most common response is that at every stage of student transition (elementary to middle school, middle to high school, and college into the workplace), the foundational skills required to write well are missing. Many students are unable to write a well-crafted sentence, much less possess the tools to organize and draft a composition about an expository topic (Eberhardt, 2013). According to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP; U.S. Department of Education, 2011), approximately 75% of students in the United States are not at the "proficient level" in writing. These results indicate that students have only partial mastery of the prerequisite knowledge and skills required for competency at a given grade level. This problem is precisely what the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, 2010), a set of national benchmarks to ensure college and career readiness, attempted to address with increased rigor in writing.
Road to the Writing Revolution-A New Set of Standards
Though the CCSS are not perfect or all encompassing, they are based on sound research and are internationally benchmarked using standards from top-performing countries for their development. The intent is that CCSS will have a positive effect on student preparation for college and careers. According to the expectations of the anchor and grade-level standards, students should demonstrate increasing levels of complexity each year in all aspects of language use, from vocabulary and sentence structure to the development and organization of compositions. Reading sources used for research, and as a springboard for writing, should also become increasingly more complex and demanding with each grade, according to the CCSS.
The Writing standards of the CCSS outline three major text types for writing: 1) opinion/argumentative, 2)...