My student’s struggle with writing is the struggle of all writers against that eternal fiend which is ever present: Apathy.

I could talk about sentence structure, transitions, reading drafts aloud and so on, but I find these deficiencies all pale in comparison to people’s ability to give a crap about what they are doing beyond performing the minimum amount of work required. Ambivalence is too strong of a word as I do not sense any loathing when it comes to people having to write.

Success is a subjective term and some people see success as merely passing while others cannot bring themselves to turn in anything less than a publishable text. There is the entire spectrum in between these poles and I am afraid I am at a bit of a loss as to how we best make students care more than they do.

I like the idea of giving students latitude in terms of what they want to write about which theoretically would lead them to pursuing topics that they have some amount of passion for and while this concept leads to less stagnant, boring  pieces of writing there are still people who are not sure what they could enjoy writing about or think their passion does not fit in an academic setting. Short of one on one, daily tutoring I am not sure what is to be done with people who do not care about what they produce.