With limited types of writing and the teacher as the audience, it sucks the life out of the writing and allows for little individuality. Very likely, students learning to tailor their writings for a specific teacher may help in the future for writing for specific people, but not for sharing with a group at all.

I think it is more of an assumption for them to mention that there is little motivation to locate quality sources; it really depends on whether a teacher will look at the resources used. This might just be my bias because I have needed to use quality resources resources for multiple papers on things I'm not interested in or I was just motivated enough to get my A, all because I knew my instructor might or is looking for it.

It is really no wonder the teachers ended up doing this. Even the most passionate teachers would change to prevent losing their job. When working under fear, how can anyone properly do their job? In a student position around that time, it was evident that many teachers didn't like it as much as students did like the situation. Many of my teachers would say every once in a while that the lesson for the day would be studying for the standardized test and it would be boring and useless for our future but necessary for everyone to continue going forward to that future.

Teachers seem to assume all other teachers are doing their job and all schools have the materials they need and therefore a student is at fault. I am, and know, of many students who went to their "not so great" neighborhood elementary school and did well enough to have the opportunity to go to a considerably better middle school than the one in their area, but we were met with problems when assumptions were made of what we should know. If someone doesn't know something, getting angry at them for it won't change the fact they need the gap in knowledge filled. Flexibility is important.

It seems less cynical and more of a fact. But thankfully postsecondary education generally will help reinforce the reading and writing skills developed prior and add to them as well. Also, anecdotally, I have noticed that many students will learn to make papers and other written work not be cookie-cutter as many were taught to during middle and high school years.

Referring to reading and writing as a practice makes it sound so formal and rigid. Something that was lacking from this reading, that has been further solidified from this conclusion, is the fact that there is little mention of creative writing. There is a heavy focus on professional type writing or what would be considered useful for a job, but part of the fun of reading and writing is the stories and poems compared to essays and textbooks that are not usually as engaging. Not to disregard the importance of the formal practice of reading and writing, but is important to mention the other parts too; they are also a part of students learning.

What type of writing are they referring too (format and the instructions for their writing)? I tried to look for what study they were referencing for their less than 10% statistic and couldn't find it. I don't doubt that it is on The Citation Project website, but I'd like to know more on the procedure that led them to come to that conclusion.

At least personally, many of my teachers in the past would tell us to intentionally not add a summary to essays or papers. Many would say that they already know the text and so it would be useless to explain; the essay should speak for itself or the summary should be reserved for an annotated bibliography if instructed to make one.