Here are comments compiled from a survey on teaching writing given by Sandra Hollin Flowers to CLA faculty in March 1997

Mechanical Problems in Student Writing

• Fluency: weak or non-existent transitions between sentences and between parts of a paper; insipid style; faulty diction; limited vocabulary; sentence fragments
  

• Lack of care in documentation and citations, inadvertent or deliberate plagiarism
  

• Grammar: subject-verb agreement and noun-pronoun agreement; use of modifiers
  

• Punctuation, particularly comma splices

Intellectual Weaknesses in Student Writing

• Thinking skills: critical, visual, abstract, creative, logic
  

• Reading skills: isolating a work's thesis and major themes/concepts; grasping an overview while reading
  

• Formulating thesis statements; conceptualizing and organizing papers
  

• Supporting assertions and opinions
  

• Undeveloped argumentation skills
  

• Synthesizing sources and ideas
  

• Recognizing anomalies and resolving contradictions
  

• Poor sense of intellectual continuity; failure to connect current reading to previous reading and life experiences
  

• Paragraph structure, development, coherence
  

Advice to Students

• Most often repeated advice: Go through the entire writing process; rewrite, rewrite, rewrite!
  

• Take advantage of peer and teacher review opportunities.
  

• Know each professor's guidelines and follow them. When in doubt, ask.
  

• Write with the reader in mind. Supply evidence, explain your reasoning.
  

• Question and learn to evaluate your own writing.
  

Advice to Colleagues on Preparing Students for Respondents' Courses

• Most often repeated advice: Teach them the research process; be sure they know how and when to quote, cite, and document sources.

• Have them write regularly with specific objectives for each assignment (argument, analysis, etc.).
  

• Hold them to strict editing and manuscript format standards.

• Teach them how to write essay exams.
  

• Teach them to hold themselves accountable to the text.
  

• Give them feedback on their writing.
  

• Assign high grades only for high levels of performance.
  

• One colleague's advice to self which applies to all writing assignments: take time to prepare the assignment carefully.