Students can write: Making writing tasks relevant and personal can bring out hidden skills.

A common complaint about student writing is that it is often very poor. Students don’t understand grammar, don’t know how to spell, don’t know what paragraphs are for, don’t understand how to reference… and so on. James Hartley writes that all of this is often true – but that it needn’t be. In one experiment, students wrote much more clearly when the formal requirements of academic essay writing were lifted.