::climbs on soap box, takes deep breath:: So, Dubya's No Child Left Behind, in addition to being responsible for the end of Reading Rainbow, pushed classroom teachers to teach to standardized testing to the detriment of teaching comprehensive writing and reading ...

ok, I'm done. If you are a reviewer on a study section that just got moved to January, please give me a 1 on my scientific writing R25.

...without separating those as distinct problems that should be addressed at different points in the writing process and need different interventions.

Writing is hard! Editing is hard! Half the time *faculty whose job it is to write* struggle with reviewing trainee work because they constantly swing between "your style doesn't fit the discourse of the field," "your grammar needs polishing," or "your argument isn't constructed well"...

And faculty who care a lot, and who value good writing, teach teach these classes, but they often don't have the necessary pedagogical support or training themselves, so they just teach what they were taught by their mentors, or what they picked up along the way.

Lots of schools now teach writing (VERY GOOD). However, I don't know about you, but the most useful pedagogical training *I* ever got before being unleashed on a higher ed classroom was, "the dry erase markers will always fail you, so bring your own" (side note: this is in fact very good advice)

So writing training is scattershot. People pick it up from their mentors, and if your mentor is a great writer and a great teacher then congratulations! But more likely you're just expected to pick it up through vibes and by piecing together advice along the way...

For graduate training, I'll talk about public health, because thats what I know. There is no systematic standard or training approach to teaching writing. AND in graduate education we devalue pedagogy as a distinct skill (and lets talk about all the ways that THAT is gendered) ...

So K-12 students weren't taught how to read and write critically, and there was a loss of institutional knowledge regarding writing pedagogy among K-12 teachers. NCLB was "reformed" by Obama in 2015, but basically anyone age ~30-40 who attended US public school experienced at least some of this

K-12 students weren't taught how to critically and holistically evaluate what they were reading, because tests only asked them to evaluate brief chunks of text. And *nobody* was evaluating writing quality, so teachers just didn't have time to teach it given the competing pressures

::climbs on soap box, takes deep breath:: So, Dubya's No Child Left Behind, in addition to being responsible for the end of Reading Rainbow, pushed classroom teachers to teach to standardized testing to the detriment of teaching comprehensive writing and reading ...

I have so many feelings about this

This is true though! People learn writing informally from their mentors. Or, if a program is really on it, there might be a scientific writing class with someone who everyone thinks is a pretty good writer - but that doesn't mean they know about how to *teach* writing.

There was a moment when I worked in a very specific niche in a very particular country that I believe I may have actually read every single relevant paper. But that moment is long gone!

An hour a day! That sounds so luxurious

Someone smarter than me said she gets a weekly table of contents email from some of her favorite journals and does a skim of that. It's just finding the *time* to read regularly, like you said

#GoldStandardScience

I feel like I go on search-and-read binges as needed for my own papers and grants, but there must be a better way?