I have one question which I will pose to all my professors. Why is it that people can't write like they used too? Now there are all these rules put out by Universitites and Colleges telling what style, margin space, how to "organize" your paper, which way your citations must be done, ...etc. It would seem as though all student writers are being programmed to write a certain way which makes all thier papers similar and there lacks a uniqueness. I feel as though creativity itself is being taken away. Although, some people do need these "rules" to help them write for they may be lost without them. I may even be one of these people but I feel as though the freedom in writing has been taken away. What ever happened to free writing...aren't those the best to write and read?

It depends what you mean by "freedom." I don't grade real closely on citation format, margins, fonts, etc. I just want clarity and completeness. If you put a semicolon instead of a colon or whatever, I am not going to have a meltdown. I just want the citations to be there and to help me find the sources you used. If you use sources that don't have authors, or just give "msnbc.com" as the source and that URL has 1000 subpages, then I don't like it. But regardless, I think the very existance of such standards intimidates students who aren't used to dealing with any kind of citation.

I'll let you write your paper on just about anything. But we are within the bounds of a discipline here. I want you to learn a bit of something about that discipline: the content of course, but EVEN MORE IMPORTANT TO ME: I want you to experience the methodology a bit. Hence I want history argued about in the conferences instead of decreeing the "truth" and "facts" in lectures. And I try to guide papers towards questions and controversies, not just "facts."

Over and above that, there are rules to good writing. They are not arbitrary; they have been developed by experience over centuries. Some more, some less, but all profs try to impart those rules and habits on students.

Those are all restrictions on "freedom," of course. To some extent, it is getting you to "write a certain way." But I don't see it as very limiiting. It all serves the purpose of making the writing more effective: citations serve a purpose and the rules that guide them help them fulfill that purpose. The same goes for the prose of the paper and the formatting rules.

One of the books I have on good writing says something to the effect of, "Once you master the rules, you can be free to violate them." What that means is that Mark Twain can "cheat" and break all kinds of rules - because he is a master.

Factors which negatively effect student writing:

- English not being their native language.

- Students taking on too many courses, often a full-time load, even when they work full time and have families as well. Or taking classes in situations that are not conducive to academia. I had a student trying to do a grad course from an FOB in Pakistan. Doing history graduate work well requires a good library. It just does. For some things, there are no short cuts. Education is now seen by many in completely functional terms: It is something that can be done and "checked off" quickly to quickly result in higher pay. But the limits of human biology and the real depth and purpose of education contradict this. That includes writing well - it simply takes time.

- The e-mail/chatroom/internet forum culture. This has gotten lots of people to write who wouldn't have written anything after high school 10 years ago. The down side is that it has led to an increase in viewing writing as something fast and informal. Clearly expressing complex ideas in a complete and concise fashion - something that takes practice - isn't practiced.

- Cutting and pasting from the internet leads not only to accusations of cheating, but leads to a lack of practice in writing. Online forum arguments which are waged by simply posting links at each other are similar.

- We just google for everything. Google offers lots and lots of garbage for "free." This leads us to lower our standards for what we consider "good": good information, good writing, good art, etc.

- Students watch TV and read blurbs on the internet instead of reading a lot of good writing. I don't want to idealize the past too much. I grew up on TV in the 1970s and video games in the 1980s. My parents grew up in the 1950s playing outside, not reading great literature all day. But the new media are now a) more pervasive and b) faster paced and c) the culture of discourse (Bill O'Reilly) is in rapid decline. This all leads to shorter attention spans and a sound-bite approach to everything (news, entertainment, art, literature, etc.).