That's somewhat of a straw man. I have no doubt it improves writing skills at least a little bit on average. I contend that it doesn't make a difference in any absolute sense.
I received AP credit and thus passed out of Freshman Composition so my experience is slightly different. In my AP class, everyone's writing skills improved but no one who was a bad writer became a good writer.
If you ask any author the most effective way to become a better writer they'll tell you to read. Most people don't like to read and thus (I believe there is a causal link here) most people are bad writers. It takes much more than two semesters of Freshman Comp. to radically improve ones writing skills. Quality writing is something that you internalize over many years.
Yeah, I agree with this. My English skills have always been top of the line (99% on standardized tests, 5s on APs, etc), and I fully accredit this to the fact that I have been reading CONSTANTLY since I was little. You have to develop an ability to hear the written word inside your head as your eyes move across the page--a lot of lower functioning people don't seem to have this, as indicated by the bizarre sentence constructions they vomit all over their word processor.
A knack for sentence flow isn't practiced, it is absorbed. Want to be a good writer? You need a vocabulary to match. Those of us who acquired extensive vocabularies through osmosis can tell when a lesser person has whipped out the thesaurus in an attempt to sound "smart." (usually, the fancy words they try to insert just end up hilariously misused, since they don't understand the different shades of meaning attached to them. You can only get that through observation of the word in its natural setting.)
As anecdata, I know someone with an English degree from our flagship state school who can't manage to comprehend the difference between "its" and "it's," "your" and "you're," and routinely mangles grammar in a manner absolutely horrifying even before you take into account the fact they studied English for OVER FOUR YEARS and still never managed to grasp the proper use of the possessive.
