As a teacher, I give a lot of positive feedback, focusing mostly on what the students do well. For many of them, this comes as a surprise.

Writing teachers are famous for their red pens and readiness to mark mistakes of grammar and punctuation. But I've found--and research backs me up--that those critical marks don't really lead to better papers. In fact, students tend to get discouraged and give up, believing that they simply lack the ability to write. This is almost never true. In my nine years of teaching, I can't think of a single student who couldn't learn to write.

The truth is that every living, breathing, communicating person uses the basic elements of academic discourse every day. We listen to arguments and respond to them--even if it's about what to cook for dinner. We summarize statements for others--sometimes simply rephrasing our children's sentences for people who haven't developed an ear for toddler-talk. And we constantly analyze the texts all around us: politicians' promises, commercials' claims, corporate jargon, legalese, and symbols of all kinds (stop signs, credit card swipers at stores, and wi-fi hotspots).

The challenge for me, as the instructor, is to help students translate these everyday skills into the particular structures of academic writing. The first step is convincing students they have these skills in the first place--and so that is why I'm cheering the class on, urging students to keep writing, even when they're discouraged. Once they believe they can learn, there's almost no limit to how much their writing can improve.

Michael Noll teaches the Free Minds academic writing unit. A fiction writer and instructor at Texas State, he discusses writing and craft at Read To Write Stories.