#Cliche old habits die hard how to#
#Cliche old habits die hard series#

My class size dwindles as the assignments collect and the papers are returned without praise for what the student truly believed were legendary masterpieces. Being told that one has superfluous wording, poor grammar, troubled syntax, or any other corrective statement can be tough to endure. There is much handholding that goes on in writing classes, and mine is no different. Ah, but my lecture notes aren’t formal writing, I reply….every semester…. They also enjoy taking my lecture notes and telling me that I break the rules: I use contractions, I start sentences with FANBOYS, etc. I patiently explain that you can’t dress up bad, no matter how hard you try. They miss their colorful phrases that they believe liven up their sentences. They tell me they miss randomly and unconsciously injected figures of speech. Over time, though, I’ve come to see that they long for their mixed metaphors, their clichés, and their idiomatic phrasings. I initially believed that students would welcome my approach of teaching them the methods and tools they’d need for their required college writing. Change really is hard, just as the cliché goes. But I think it has more to do with how hard it is to let go of what we know, what we are comfortable with, even if that “what” doesn’t gain us positive results. Some might think that these types of incidents as absolute proof that students are rude and ungrateful. When I explained that arguability, if nothing else, made for a more interesting thesis, and potentially a more interesting essay, she interrupted again to tell me that no other English teacher ever taught thesis statements this way, and her proof was that her brother had had a composition class the previous semester and his teacher didn’t, nor had any of her high school teachers. She was quite sure that they could simply be informative. They don’t have to be arguable, she vehemently maintained.

In another class, a young woman interrupted my lecture on thesis statements to inform me that I taught thesis statements all wrong. His reasoning was that no other teacher had said anything. I’d given him the benefit of the doubt and explained unintentional plagiarism, but he was adamant that it wasn’t necessary to cite anywhere in the document as long as he had a Works Cited page. A few years ago I had a student insist that he wasn’t plagiarizing, even though he had no citations at all anywhere in his writing. He was undaunted, though, by the evidence of his own work.ĭenial is not new to me in these classes. When I asked him to find me the subject of the sentences he couldn’t, of course.

#Cliche old habits die hard series#

His writing was a series of long-winded sentences that offered no subject, only layers and layers of modifying adverbs and adjectives. He shook his head, clucked his tongue, and told me that I just didn’t like him and that’s why I was so hard on his fantastic work. I had a young man approach me just a few weeks ago.

They believe that what they produce is good writing and previous teachers gave them poor grades for other reasons. Worse, students don’t even realize they have bad habits.

No one likes to be criticized and no one wants their comfortable bad habits attacked. Even if I explain all of this to the students and they agree that learning methods is what they most desire, when we get into the actual methods work they balk.

#Cliche old habits die hard how to#

As I’ve said before, critical thinking is important, but if the students can’t figure out how to put their ideas down on the page in a readable way, then no one will care if they thought critically.