What is the most difficult thing to me about teaching writing and how do I go about doing that?

Writing instruction in a science class presents some unique and some global challenges.  The most unique is probably the vocabulary as terms are introduced and defined that have not previously been encountered.  A global problem that I consider particularly challenging is that of teaching students to prepare audience appropriate materials.

A couple of years ago, I asked students in a Biochemistry Laboratory to compose an essay about something called the Maillard reaction.  The Maillard reaction, also known as the browning reaction, is the phenomenon responsible for turning meat brown, converting bread to toast, turning beer brown, along with hundreds of other examples. The Maillard reaction is named for Louis-Camille Maillard, a French chemist who studied the science of browning during the early 1900s. The Maillard reaction is actually a complicated biochemical reaction that happens to have an important effect on foods and other protein-based technologies.  I assigned the essay to be completed during the Thanksgiving holiday as the material could be applied to roasted turkey, etc.  I gave the students a series of questions to prompt their research and writing.

The essays were, in general, well constructed although I stressed to the students that I would not be technically grading them on their written style.  What was interesting was the diversity of context and style that was used.  It occurred to me that I had not told the students who they should be writing this for.  My goal was to have them be able to explain the Maillard reaction to someone who had not any Biochemistry which some of them did.  Others, however, chose to make the essay more technical, which was admirable, but did not demonstrate to me that they could contextualize the technical information.

For the next written assignment, I asked the students to prepare a diagrammatic representation of cellular respiration and targeted to high school students and again, the completed essays were quite varied in style and content.  It occurred to me that not everyone has had the same high school experience, so naturally, the audience definition and experience might be different for each of the students.

I decided that regardless of the style and content used by each student, the sheer process of writing about these topics contributed to their learning.  “Because writing is often our representation of the world made visible, embodying both process and product, writing is more readily a form and source of learning than talking” (Emig, 1977).  But I wanted the writing to also represent a measurable outcome.  How well could the student, based on my measurement, describe the processes assigned to them?  To be able to do this, for the next assignment, I had the students tell me who their intended audience was.  This forced them to think about their writing style as they did it.

Next semester, I’m going to assign another essay topic, but describe a single individual, in detail, with background and history, as the audience.  Then, I’ll have the students tell me how their chosen style specifically addressed this fictional audience.