Tyre vs Osborne: The Struggles of a Student While Writing

Two sources that address why students struggle with writing are “The Writing Revolution” by Peg Tyre and Thomas Osborne’s “Late Nights, Last Rites, and the Rain-Slick Road to Self-Destruction.” Upon reading these two articles, I realized that many students struggle in some way with writing. Each article brings a fresh perspective of how two people at different stages in their educational careers struggled with writing. As a student in her first year of university, I have experienced what Peg Tyre investigates in “The Writing Revolution”, and I am currently watching Thomas Osborne’s “Late Nights, Last Rites, and the Rain-Slick Road to Self-Destruction” in real time through my own lens. I think the different approaches taken by the Tyre and Osborne effectively carry across the main points in each of these sources. I agree with the points in the articles and also relate with the students shortcomings. Both articles have similar general topics but couldn’t be more different rhetorically.

Osborne wrote a witty and expressive open-form piece on the hardships he experienced while writing an essay for his first year literature class. He describes in detail that he spent over 8 hours assembling his masterpiece, only to discard it afterwards because he thought it was not good enough. Like most students, he compared his work to a fellow classmate’s work and came to the conclusion that his essay was “awful”. After throwing his essay away and starting over, he spent another period of time reflecting and evaluating himself as a writer. He came to another conclusion shortly after. He realized his essay was good all along and that he was his harshest critic. His own expectations for himself were the hole in the hull of his ship, allowing a rush of self-doubt to sink his spirits.

Where Osborne describes his situation in the first person, Tyre describes the situation of a student named Monica Dibella, and how her school is failing to teach her how to write properly. “The Writing Revolution” tackles the struggles that high school students at New Dorp High School have with writing analytically due to a lack of good writing instruction. Tyre explains that although it is good to write strong personal pieces, it also important to compose well-written persuasive and expository essays. To support this, Tyre stated “70 to 75 percent of students in grades four through twelve write poorly.” To overcome this, New Dorp consulted with another school called Windward School where the students who graduated are proficient in writing due to their writing program. New Dorp’s principal decided to implement this “expository-writing program” into all courses that students take at the school. Writing became a big aspect of every subject and this yielded a large improvement for New Dorp High School.

As I am a freshman taking ENC 1101, I understand what Osborne was explaining and agree that one of the main reasons students struggle with writing is a lack of self-confidence. In his article Osborne said, “It was the first paper I had written in a long time that I felt genuinely proud of.” Even though he was proud of it, his lack of self-confidence led to him throwing the whole essay away after comparing it to a friend’s own. He referred it is being “out of whack” and began doubting is capabilities as a writer. After spending hours on this essay, he was shattered by his own thoughts that his essay was not good enough. Soon after, he realized that this was all in his head and thought to himself, “Perhaps I do not want to become what my friends, and many others are: cutouts of the perfect students, examples to abide by,” then slowly built back up his confidence. The open-form structure of this article allows the reader to envision this scenario from his point of view. It made the article more personal and therefore a great contrast to Tyre’s article.

“The Writing Revolution” was written by Tyre based on another person entirely. We don’t see Tyre’s perspective on the matter but rather the angle of the student. The reader relies on her interview with Monica to understand her point completely. Tyre uses statistical evidence such as, “In 2005, 82 percent of freshmen entered the school reading below grade level,” and “Pass rates for the English Regents, for example, bounced from 67 percent in June 2009 to 89 percent in 2011,” to support her point that better writing instruction will improve the students’ performance. I agree strongly with that point and the evidence does not lie. A quote from Monica states, “The more writing instruction I got, the more I understood which words were important,” meaning that her writing wasn’t the only thing that improved, her comprehension did as well.

Both of these sources discuss why students struggle with writing and give explanations for each point. These sources resonated with me due to my experiences as a student and I related to Osborne's self-doubt and Monica's lack of writing instruction that made it difficult for me to write.

Works Cited

Osborne, Thomas. “Late Nights, Last Rites, and the Rain-Slick Road to Self-Destruction.” Stylus: A Journal of First-Year Writing, vol. 2, no. 2, 2011.

Tyre, Peg. “The Writing Revolution.” The Atlantic, Oct. 2012.