What is the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing, and how do you go about teaching that?

What is the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing, and how do you go about teaching that?

This question is a bit more complicated that just picking one specific area that is most difficult to teach when teaching writing. It really depends on your audience is, and what their prior knowledge and skills of writing are. I say this because I would imagine a Kindergarten teacher's response will differ from a middle school teacher's, from a high school teacher's, from a FYC teacher's and from a graduate level teacher. But being that this course is about FYC, obviously that is what the question is geared towards.

I've never taught FYC, so I honestly don't know what the most difficult thing to teach in teaching writing will be, however, I highly doubt it varies drastically from the challenges I faced as a high school teacher. I also doubt my answer will stray from what the most difficult concept for me was as a FYC student. So my answer is editing. Not revision, but simple editing for grammar, syntax, clarity and cohesion. While my background stems from essay and technical writing, I can imagine the struggle to teach editing skills is probably shared with creative writers as well. 

The reason I say editing is probably the hardest thing to teach when teaching writing is because if a student can't write well in the first place, and they do not understand or know how to write better, then how can they edit their own work to make it better? This was a struggle I faced as a young writer. I simply could not see the mistakes I was making that my teachers clearly could. 

The big red circle around a word/phrase/sentence with a question mark was traumatizing. I didn't understand what my teacher didn't understand about my sentence. When I would gather the courage to ask, my teacher would say something like, "this doesn't make sense" or "I don't understand what you mean here," and my response would always be: "what don't you understand about it? How does it not make sense?" So my struggle, as I'm sure I share with many writers is, not understanding what someone else doesn't understand about my work.

To me, teaching editing skills should be taught both first and last. I think with a solid knowledge of grammar skills, a firm grasp on syntax, and high exposure to quality essays written with concise and clear language is necessary before a student even begins to write an essay, because this allows for editing to actually happen during the writing process. Then, after the essay is written, a student should be able to go back and read through their essay to edit their work. 

Of course easier said than done. Because what if the student doesn't have a firm grasp of grammar and syntax and hasn't had much exposure to well written texts? Then what? How are you supposed to teach writing with clarity when a student can't determine what high quality writing looks like. I say this because as a high school teacher I once laid out three example paragraphs. One was written in I guess what you would call "cultural language" using letters and numbers to replace whole words, using double negatives, etc. the second example was a piece that looked like a thesaurus threw up on a piece of paper (and the content itself, even if you knew the words, didn't make much sense), and the third example was of high quality writing with standard (undergraduate) college appropriate language. I asked my students to choose the best piece, the one that would be considered high quality written work. Many of them chose the thesaurus vomit and said they chose it because "if it uses big words, it must be right."

So I had to explain to my students that just because a person uses big words doesn't mean it's good writing. So I showed them an alternate version of the thesaurus vomit text using lower level language and they all said "ohhh... that doesn't make any sense! We choose number 3 instead." 

There are many different ways to teach editing, just as there are many different ways to teach writing. And again, I think it really depends on your audience for exactly how you teach these concepts. For instance, if you're teaching a room full of math and science majors, it's probably best to break down the writing and editing process as a formula or instructions: your thesis statement is like the number one. It goes into everything. Everything always has the number one in it. Or maybe consider the thesis statement as an atom. Atoms are everywhere and in everything. (I don't know honestly, I'm not a science or math major, but I think you get my point here.)

So, if you're teaching creative students, perhaps from the liberal arts side, you might consider teaching writing and editing as a picture, like a tree. Your thesis statement is the trunk, everything must connect to it. Then you have your large branches which are your body paragraphs, and you have these smaller branches that connect to the large branch that is your supportive evidence for that particular paragraph. 

Lastly, always always always make your students read their work aloud. I don't have a clue where I first learned this, and I'm sure most of us know to do this, but reading our work aloud allows our brains to actually focus on each word on the page, but when we read silently our brains can and often will skip or fill-in-the-blank for something that's missing. 

To recap: I think the most difficult thing to teach when teaching writing is editing. And you go about teaching it by ensuring your students have a firm grasp of good grammar and syntax and have been exposed to high quality writing. Then once your students have this, have them read their papers aloud to a peer, so they will catch things that they didn't before, and their peer will also be able to ask questions about parts they didn't understand. If you want to make it even better, have a peer read their work aloud.