There is sometimes a tendency in college writing teachers – I am as guilty of this as anyone – to demonize the ways that writing is taught in high school based on the ways our students write when they get to college. The truth is that there is a lot of good writing instruction that happens in high school, but it’s inconsistent. Some teachers focus solely on language and grammar, while some focus solely on ideas and argumentation. Some teach the five-paragraph essay; some hate it. Some teach evidence and analysis; some teach students to conclude every essay with “life lessons.” Some “teach for the test” – whether it is the AP test or the SAT – while some teach more creative ways of thinking about writing that nevertheless become marginalized when admittance to college is at stake.

Below is a list of the 10 biggest changes that will occur in your writing while in college.

1. There will be a shift from the five-paragraph essay to more sophisticated organizational structures.
2. There will be a shift from understanding a “research paper” as a book report that synthesizes what other writers have said and “picks a side” to understanding it as an original argument that is situated in an ongoing academic conversation.
3. There will be a shift from readings that moralize life lessons to those that analyze evidence in and for a specific discipline.
4. There will be a shift from surface or conventional arguments that try to “get the text right” based on your teacher’s understanding of it to imaginative, creative, playful, risky, independent arguments.
5. There will be a shift from multi-factoral theses that therefore preview the organization of a paper to theses that are focused on a single but complex idea.
6. There will be a shift from thinking that it is a weakness to qualify your claims in any way to dealing seriously and responsibly with counter-arguments.
7. There will be a shift from thinking about revision as editing the language errors in a paper to thinking about it as improving an idea and then writing a new paper for that new idea (as opposed to updating an old paper).
8. There will be a shift from the repetitive claim/evidence procedure in body paragraphs to body paragraphs that are built around the unfolding of a complex idea.
9. There will be a shift from the insecure presentation of ideas to strong and confident considerations, even speculations on the meaning and significance of things that is bold because it is fully thought through.
10. There will be a shift from writing about literature to writing about everything.

In high school, most (though not all) learning about writing occurs in the context of an English class. As you know from high school, however, you write academic papers about all sorts of things that aren’t literature. In college, you’ll be asked to think about and work on your writing in fields other than literary studies.