Teaching Writing

I have two very good groups of students in my literature course this semester. I'm very proud of them because, except for two native speakers of Spanish, these kids learned to speak the language at our university. And now, when they are in their junior and senior years, they can read, analyze and discuss works of literature from La Celestina to Tiempo de silencio. One thing, however, that it's consistently difficult to get them to do well is to write an essay. I'm not talking about their linguistic limitations here, just the actual knowledge of how to construct a good piece of writing. 

The training that students get in how to write well is often seriously lacking. To give an example, they have all been told ad nauseam that they need to come up with a good thesis for their essay. However, nobody took the trouble of explaining that "Cervantes is a famous author" or "These two short stories have some differences and some similarities" are not good theses. They also have no idea that inane statements like "All works of literature have characters" or "Everybody wants to be happy" do not add anything valuable to a piece of writing.

It also seems to me that some enemy of humanity taught many of my students that it's a good idea to pluck out statements from each paragraph and repeat them (often verbatim) in the conclusion. There is also this annoying strategy of starting a new paragraph with the same sentence that concluded the preceding one.

The students seem genuinely surprised when I tell them to avoid generalizations, trivialities and not to copy-paste the same sentence into different parts of the same sentence. They are also shocked to find out that I don't like them to copy-paste things I said in my PowerPoint presentations into their essays as their own statements.