One of the most difficult challenges facing student writers today is the need to reconcile the literate skills learned through social media with the formal demands of academic genres such as essays and term papers. Often, neither the social nor academic genres prove very helpful in occupational settings - you can't learn resume writing from the five-paragraph essay any more than you can learn it from Facebook. This becomes still more complicated as you factor in the variety of disciplines represented in English 101 - I frequently teach students in business, nursing, the humanities, and other majors, and each academic field has it's own demands for "good" writing.
My goal as an instructor is to help students understand that there are differences between the types of writing they are expected to write. From there, we look at how "good" writing in many genres will share requirements for evidence, relevance, and coherence - understanding the differences in approach can allow students to transfer skills from one genre to another.
