Can Writing Skills Help Bridge The Education Gap?

Writing is one of the essential things in students’ life. They need to improve this significant skill in order to develop their cognitive learning. Only regular practice of writing can help to become successful in this sphere. However, a lot of students have no doubt that learning to write properly will help only the smartest people and others will not be able to improve their ability to compose texts. Moreover, there are thousands of teachers who are sure that writing education is significant only for grammar and it is impossible to get more intelligent and to get rid of the education gap.

Is it possible to help bridge the education gap improving writing skills?

A lot of the most powerful people these days have graduated from the most well-known universities such as Oxford or Cambridge. However, it is almost impossible to get to these prestigious colleges if you don’t have much money to pay for your education. Nevertheless, those young adults who do not have rich parents should not worry because there are hundreds of effective methods which will help them to succeed not paying any money. And one of them is the ability to craft texts.

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Writing helps to improve critical thinking

If you try putting down your ideas on paper more than usual, you will recognize that your ideas are becoming more organized. For the first time, it can be difficult to write what you think even about easy topics. However, daily practice will help to get much better soon and to write even about the most complicated issues.

Those people who write a lot regularly recognize that they do not only write what they think but also look for arguments which will help them to prove their ideas. That is why they find more information while writing about different themes. This process will become even more beneficial if teachers encourage those students who express their ideas. They will love to write and the fact that I need to do my homework (writing an essay) will not be so terrible for them. In this situation, teachers also need to focus more on how students express their ideas while checking their essays. It is better to concentrate less on their grammar mistakes. Moreover, it will be great if they start practicing different exercises which help to improve critical thinking.

Drafting a text is one of the most profitable means of self-affirmation

Nowadays there are almost no creative assignments where students can write about their personal background. However, these exercises are also significant because they help young adults to understand more about their personalities. This knowledge will help them to show in their essays what they really think and get more ambitious.

Geoffrey Cohen, a professor of psychology in one of the most popular universities, conducted an interesting experiment on Latino and African-American students. He decided to divide the whole year into different periods. The first one is the beginning of the year, the second is a holiday, and the third one is for those weeks when students write tests and pass their exams. After that, he told the students to write about what they thought. They could choose topics which were not school-themed.

When the professor got the results and conducted the research, he found out that students become more confident and successful when teachers allow them to talk about their personal experiences and problems.

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Ability to write in a clear and concise way is also essential for teachers

Ability to write texts can become a great method to be more successful not only for students but also for teachers. Of course, this is an amazing way for them to improve students’ grammar and punctuation. However, this is also a technique which helps teachers to understand why students are afraid of showing themselves while completing text drafting exercises. There are a lot of magnificent methods which help to find their problems by building the texts.

Is it possible to make students love writing?

It is significant to bridge the learning gap not only for students but also for teachers. Only those people who understand that the ability to build texts is one of the most effective ways to become a successful person can achieve everything. That is why there are a lot of techniques which are used to encourage students to write more. The most profitable of them are shown below.

• Teachers need to add more tasks to build texts step by step. So, students start with the easiest topics and go to the most essential issues;
• There should not be any cliches which will help students to write. It will improve their imagination;
• If a theme is too hard to understand, teachers should offer students to write about it dividing it into small topics.

A study published by a leading Learning & Development company quotes a McKinsey specialist who suggests that employers expect people in their 20s have writing as one of the core competencies.  

Educational Week has a special report dedicated to the issue. The key takeaway is that many educators believe that it is students responsibility (and not theirs) to make sure they master the writing skills. The challenge seems to be that it starts somewhere in the middle school where the priorities are set and often writing isn’t on the top of the list.  Then it continues like this till and through the university, and once a person is on the job market, the gap crashes many potentially successful careers. The logic behind the employer’s requirements to have an advanced text crafting skill level is very simple. If a person is able to structure their own thoughts and present them in a concise and clear way, it minimizes the overhead. I.e., the ideas are sooner understood, the quality of understanding is high, and the result is achieved sooner. Less time means more money for the company. That’s why people whose text drafting skills are “average” aren’t on the radar of top employers, though it isn’t too late to bring one’s text composition skills to the whole new level.

To sum up, the education gap is one of the most important issues these days and writing is one of the best ways to get rid of this problem. Teachers need to remember that every student has his own voice, and he is allowed to show it while writing even though it does not seem to be right. This is the only way to let everybody get the same possibilities.