students today aren’t learning how to write?

Unfortunately for those students, written communication is the single most valuable skill in the internet era. The more we do online, the more we have to write; writing is increasingly central to our interactions.

Writing is also crucial for success in every academic discipline—even the STEM fields! Of course, writing is especially important for the subjects we teach at the Gilliam Writers Group: the humanities. The term “humanities” encompasses a wide variety of disciplines including English Language Arts, History, Social Studies, the Social Sciences, Philosophy, Classics, and more.

Consider that writing is the first step toward everything else in our society. We write to set ideas in motion by sharing them; we write to compile data and interpret patterns; we even write to pre-plan other communication through forms of media like audio and video. Today, nothing is considered official until it’s written down and stored in a network. It follows that 21st-century students should receive intensive training in writing throughout their educations. But they don’t.

Despite writing’s obvious importance, few schools act to improve their writing instruction programs when confronted with mediocre results. Even fewer schools seem able to identify these mediocre results when they surface. Often, writing and humanities teachers face the same lack of training that impedes their students.

Nonetheless, those rare teachers who can provide consistent, well-developed feedback on their students’ writing often encounter yet another barrier to communicating this feedback effectively. America’s standard classroom learning model precludes the quality of instruction (individual, long-term, and detail-focused) that every novice needs in order to learn a craft well. In the Middle Ages, apprentices mastered crafts through frequent, direct instruction and real-time intervention from mentors. Today, they learn in socially indirect group environments geared toward passive absorption of theoretical knowledge. A classroom is no place—or at least, it’s an insufficient place—to learn writing skills.

As a result, most students today cannot write a logically structured paragraph. Many also struggle to read, having never quite learned how to organize & interpret the increasingly vast quantities of information they consume on a daily basis. This means that even their A+ essays often lack the intellectual consistency that stems from genuine understanding of texts.

The Gilliam Writers Group offers you the literary training students currently lack, delivered with the convenience and efficiency of virtual learning. Over time, our online writing tutors work to restructure students’ thinking habits, ironing out mental pathways jumbled by years of ineffectual reading and writing. We teach the craft of writing along with supportive techniques for information processing and reading comprehension.

How? Through custom writing courses online, we train our students simultaneously in writing mechanics (grammar, style, vocabulary, phonics if necessary) and formal academic analysis, encouraging skill repetition to the point of mastery. To keep them engaged during this process, we encourage them to research and write about topics they find compelling. In this way, our students learn to use writing as a tool for sharpening the clarity, logic, and nuance of their own internal perceptions.

To schedule a free consultation call with a representative from the Gilliam Writers Group leadership team, click here.

To learn more about our teaching methods, our writing tutors’ backgrounds, and our educational philosophy, just scroll down!

If you’re ready to help your student get more from their academic experience than ever before, consider hiring a tutor for writing skills through the Gilliam Writers Group today.