Interesting...more detailed, but essentially the same writing lesson my wife gives her 7th Grade Special Ed. students on how to move from sentence, to paragraph, to a series of paragraphs supporting a single topic.

I guess this is a sad commentary on the state of writing in our students entering college. Then again, the adults aren't off the hook either...I remember proofreading some of our daughter's HS work, and while raw, she wrote far better than many people I work with.

I would also recommend Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". Here is an online copy:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

As usual, I need to take some of my own advice ...

I disagree with the point about not saying "I believe". This type of qualifier is important in the financial world to differentiate fact from opinion. It helps the writer clarify the certainty of the point they are making and probably helps to avoid lawsuits. I believe using "I believe" may not be critical in a thesis but implementing its usage is good practice in general.

Why am I being more careful about my grammar in this post than in an average internet post?

The educational studies on teaching students to write insist that students only learn to write well if their writing is evaluated and they are forced to rewrite. Of course, this is twice as much work and most instructors do not do this.

A key to organizing any writing is outlining. To teach students how to write, the requirements should be to
1. Submit an outline.
2. Submit a final draft.
3. Submit the finished writing.

Outlines are easy to grade.
Final drafts can be checked using computer software and not checked for content.
Grading the final papers should be a much more pleasant task.

Hire extra TAs to do the grading if necessary (we need the work). Help support more bright young students through grad school.

" Submit an outline...."

I would like to see this be a requirement for Op-Ed writers as well, to more effectively expose the logic and/or vacuity of their exposition.

In "style and grammar," "needles" should have been "needless" which leads to the next rule:
Using "spellcheck" on your word processing program is not a substitute for actual proofreading.

Gersen's initial paragraph could be tightened up considerably. From the "More important" on line 2, he's saying good writing is a threshold skill: if you don't write well, few will bother to read what you've written, and your ideas won't get heard. Period.

Over the years, one sees many variants of Gersen's guide (and if one is a teacher, composes some as well).

Things Gersen should be careful about:

(a) "Your introduction is not a warm-up." This should be expressed more precisely. An author should not write an introduction in order to work out her ideas. For the reader, however, it is quite reasonable to treat the introduction as a warm-up: if well written, an introduction preheats the appropriate parts of the reader's brain, so that the substantive paragraphs work more effectively.

(b) "Offest subordinate clauses with commas!" (This with an exclamation point, no less). This bring us back once again (how we have missed it!) to the old "which/that" debate. A supplemental subordinate clause...one introduced with "which"...is fundamentally paranthetical, and needs commas. A restrictive subordinate clause, introduced with "that", most emphatically should NOT be set aside with commas.

"Jane's house, which lies near the river, is painted green."

"A house that lies too near a river will be washed away." (Try this with commas!)

Otherwise, Gersen's suggestions will guide students well.

Bakho is right. The writing assignments I used to give my classes were based on the idea that repetition is important when you are trying to teach someone the right way to express themselves.

I assigned memos rather than papers because that forced everyone to be more concise,and is far more difficult to write. Few students know how to
write memos and even fewer instructors ask them to do it even though that they will likely use that far more often in the future. Inevitably, instead of grading the what they submitted, I would make style and editing suggestions and have them rewrite it. This second version is the one that was graded.

The second assignment was a longer version of the first memo.

The final assignment was a variation on the second and usually included a requirement that the writer actually make a recommendation.

I've run into former student who, years later, told me how valuable that experience has been.

"Your introduction is not a warm-up. You can warm-up in your prose, but delete the warm-up before you hand in the paper."

If by "the warm-up" he was referring to an anecdotal lead, he might send that note to the Wall Street Journal. They require anecdotal leads as a way to make stories about dull topics more inviting. Their "thesis paragraphs" are typically 3 to 5 paragraphs down.

If your volunteer is going to be a pedant, he should know that "warm-up" is a modifier. His second of three "warm-up"s should be "warm up" (no hyphen), which is the proper construction for the verb.

A number of years ago, two economists (MIT? Harvard? Darned if I can remember) did some research on the basic skills that people need to hold middle-class jobs in an evolving economy. There were, if I recall correctly, four: literacy, numeracy, communication skills, and computer skills (not the ability to program in C++, but the ability to use something like the MS Office suite of products). I can't recall the title, source, or authors. Can someone provide me with this information? I would sincerely appreciate it!