Everyone has been told at least once in an English class to use claim, evidence and reasoning to format their writing. Although this might get you high grades in high school, it might not be enough to carry with you throughout life. Writing is a fundamental concept taught in schools from kindergarten to high school through required classes and credits. Students uninterested in reading or writing-related careers often skip elective writing courses, limiting their skill development.
However, being a strong writer is essential in many unexpected fields. At the University of California Berkeley, students majoring in genetics and plant biology are required to complete two designated reading and composition courses with a C-grade or higher by the end of their sophomore year. Writing is very necessary for college, yet Redwood students don’t all feel prepared. According to a March Bark survey, only 32 percent of students feel that school has prepared their writing skills for college or jobs. The undeniable importance of being a strong writer is not reflected in the curriculum of the required writing courses in middle school and high school.
The California Department of Education standard for writing grades 6-12 is broken down into four requirements. In those requirements, students must be able to write arguments supporting claims from a text, informative and explanatory texts and narratives of real or imagined experiences using detail and structured event order. Additionally, students should be able to produce clear and coherent writing that is organized; strengthen their writing through revising and editing; produce a short research project based on a question; and gather relevant information for print and digital sources. Lastly, a student should be able to work on a piece of writing routinely over long and short time frames.

Classes teaching these requirements establish a need to write with a formula created to meet the highest level on a rubric. As a result, students write only to earn the highest grade, not to develop their skills.
Harold Cox, a professor at Boston University, finds that giving rubrics limits his students creativity and critical thinking.
“When they follow a rubric, students often avoid taking risks with assignments to meet specific criteria and get a good grade. They hold on to the rubric like a life raft in the ocean of uncertainty. They’re terrified of making a move without a checklist to validate each step,” Cox said.
When students are taught the formulaic way of writing, it can hurt more than it helps, as students lean towards writing the bare minimum for a grade, just like Cox has observed with his students.
Not only are students overly reliant on rubrics and formulas but they are taught that there is only one way to write. This causes them to lose a personal touch and writing style, stunting their ability to prepare their writing for when they are no longer presented with rubrics.
Vivienne Murphy, a junior in high school, wrote about her experience with developing writing skills in the PWN Teen Journal. Until her junior year of high school, she wrote with a simple structure that she had been taught in an early English class and received mostly high grades. However, after taking Advanced Placement (AP) Literature and Composition, she began to focus on making her writing thoughtful and stopped writing simply for credit. She emphasized that writing should not be a formula to meet basic requirements; instead, it should use imagination, emotion and personal experiences.
English classes are taught using these California requirements to prepare students for standardized tests like the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP), which are administered to students in grades three through eight and 11th-grade students. This forces students to adhere to limiting standards, eliminating many’s enthusiasm to strive for genuine improvement, starting in third grade. Although these tests and standards can help students learn the fundamentals and writing, it doesn’t result in the full development of writing skills. This way of teaching causes students to lose the need to go above the standards. In 2024, around 49 percent of Redwood students scored near or below standard on Writing and Research in the English Language Arts (ELA), a part of CAASPP testing.
Writing classes focused entirely on requirements and rubrics impede students’ writing skills from growing further and contribute to a lack of motivation. With the current structure of baseline English writing classes, students will not be prepared for college-level writing or intellectual careers. For students to fully improve their writing skills the way it is taught in schools must be changed. As a part of this change, classes should not be intended to teach students only specific requirements on tests but instead to build on students’ general understanding of writing.