My high school English classes focused on two things: writing skills and literary analysis. The problem was that they tried to teach us writing skills by having us write literary analysis essays. For me, this meant that I had trouble focusing on my writing skills because I was struggling to come up with decent literary analysis. (I neither particularly care about nor am very good at literary analysis.) This was compounded by the fact that some teachers would give you better marks for coming up with a creative and unique interpretation and fully justifying and supporting it with the text, while others would give you worse marks for not coming up with the standard interpretation. I never reached the point of giving a moment's thought to "Is the structure of my argument optimal? What questions would the reader be asking at this point?" because I was too busy trying to come up with a thousand words about symbolism.
They did try to teach us stuff about business correspondence and such as well, but the problem here was they taught us all about the structure without any thought as to the content. In Grade 9, they "taught" us how to write a resume by saying..."Your assignment is to write your resume." Problem: I'm in Grade 9. I've never had a job. What do I actually put on my resume? Yeah, they gave us all kinds of inapplicable advice, like "List achievements, such as "increased sales by 30%," but that doesn't help a teenager get their first job. So I put my education and extracurriculars all the right format, and got a decent mark for it because I got the format right. But I still had no idea what I could actually put on my resume to get a job.
I didn't actually learn how to do that properly until well into university, in the English and French writing courses that were part of my tiny and obscure translation program. The way they taught us there was "Find an ad for a job you're qualified for and could totally do. Then prepare a resume and cover letter to apply for that specific job." They did give us some examples of how you might tailor hypothetical resumes to hypothetical situations, but the most valuable thing was working with my own actual personal history and actual real-life ads for jobs that I am in fact qualified to do. I knew all my information and I knew why I met the requirements of the job, I just had to work on presenting it. I didn't have to worry about "What do I write?", so I could focus my energy on "How do I write it?"
One of the humanities courses I took had a similar approach to essay-writing. The prof had clearly found that his students weren't always on even ground in terms of understanding and being able to meet the expectations of university-level essays, so for our first assignment he gave us something that was intended to simply teach us how to meet these expectations. We spent some time in class talking about Goffman's definition of a total institution until we all seemed to more or less grok it. Then we got the assignment: pick something - anything in the world - and write an essay explaining why it meets Goffman's definition of a total institution. We had the definition all set out in our textbook, we had discussed it extensively in class, we all knew the arguments for a few of the standard examples of total institutions (but were free to pick anything else in the world), and since were were all picking our own example of an institution we all believed the argument made in our essay to be true. Since the content was obvious, we could focus solely on structuring our argument. So we did that assignment, got it back, and had a very clear idea of the prof's expectations and how to meet them, which served us well in conducting more in-depth critical analysis later in the course.
I think all English classes should take this approach. Create situations in which the "What do I say?" is obvious, so students can learn to express it well. Then once they've mastered that, you can spend time on literary analysis.
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