Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities

An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing.

There seems to be widespread agreement that—when it comes to the writing skills of college students—we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing w...