First-Year Writing Today

Abstract

The cry that new college students can’t write is old and persistent. In the 1870s, Harvard University’s president railed against incoming students’ “incorrectness” and “inelegance” in writing, spurring several literacy crisis reports under the title “Why Johnny Can’t Write.” In 1975, a Newsweek article bearing the same name suggested that most graduating secondary students were not “able to write English at the minimal college level” (Sheils, 1975, p. 58). In 2011, The Guardian reported that across England, both “non-traditional” and “traditional” new college students were struggling with essay writing (Tickle, 2011). And recent U.S. descriptions suggest the same, going as far as to label new college students the “dumbest generation” (Bauerlein, 2008; Holland, 2013; Singleton-Jackson, Lumsden, & Newsom, 2009). More tempered accounts, stemming from research across the world, also note a mismatch between secondary and college writing: “The academic prose of students is a reflection of the gap between secondary and post-secondary contexts,” write Carmen Sancho Guinda and Ken Hyland; as a result, “learners [are] bridging the gap through imitation and self-discovery” (2012, p. 6).