Summary
Courses are inevitably generic, teacher-centric, and inflexible. Maybe that works for trade courses. However, writing students are too diverse for any course to meet their needs. [ Courses, more detail ]
Universities exhibit all the problems affecting courses while adding more of their own. Students of university writing courses mainly learn to discuss writing theory. Talking is not the same as doing, and that’s the especially true for writing. The overwhelming majority of students feel that university writing degrees waste their time. [ Universities, more detail ]
For non-degree writing subjects, universities employ any holder of any PhD to teach them. This is total insanity, because academics are absolutely the worst writers. They usually need a huge amount of tutoring in plain-English just to make their stuff comprehensible. Anyway, a PhD is not a teaching qualification, and even actual teaching qualifications do not necessarily demonstrate teaching ability. [ PhDs, more detail ]
The assignments in university writing courses don’t benefit students as much as they could. Students need feedback to improve, but if the assignment is relatively okay, frazzled teachers seldom give any. So a mediocre assignment will pass, and the student will have missed an opportunity to improve it. This undermines the only reason to take the course.
If the assignment is not okay, students might have to resubmit. This could be beneficial, although the situation is unlikely because modern customer-oriented universities avoid failing anyone. Also, students usually only get one shot to resubmit, turning the normal writing and rewriting process into a high-stress, high-stakes situation.
Either way, writing courses reward mediocrity and neglect the most important part of professional writing life: the continuous rewriting and improvement. Courses make it impossible for students to achieve excellence. [ Assignments, more detail ]
Traditional methods don’t work. Everyone except teachers knows that. Learners need something better.
Next section: Courses are ineffective
Articulate Writing 