Improving Your Students’ Writing: Arts and Drafts

More and more psychology instructors are having students write multiple drafts of research papers. This process leads to better final papers and is closer to what psychologists do when they write their own scientific work. However, faculty members are often frustrated by the enormous amounts of time needed to comb through and respond to rough drafts. Likewise, students become frustrated and overwhelmed when their papers are returned with a mass of red ink, with every extraneous comma circled, and with each page littered with multiple occurrences of "AWK," as if the paper were annotated by a tropical bird. Assumptions This Teaching Tip column provides instructors with advice on how to improve the scientific writing of their students. We start with two assumptions. First, writing well is not so much a matter of correct grammar as it is a matter of expressing ideas well.