More Writing Advice: What are the "Basics" of Writing?

I teach a course in writing for teachers. In this course, I often hear about “the basics of writing.” My students interested in primary grade teaching are especially convinced that there are fundamentals students need to know before they go on to the complexities.

I am really not playing dumb when I ask, “What are the basics of writing?” I do want to know.

For students coming out of the American general education movement, the basics are always these: grammar, sentence structure, and paragraphing. These three areas are also what universities and colleges focus on in their “basic” or “remedial” writing courses. The assumption is that their students didn’t get enough of these when they were younger. Sometimes penmanship is thrown in as a fourth basic, though this seems to be declining in importance with the rise of laptops. But regardless of whether we count three or four of them, the remedy to the problem is always seen as going back to them, as though writing is a building and it needs a good foundation.

I like the idea of foundations, but I do think the metaphor only goes so far before it stops being useful or clarifying. So I prompt my students. Is imagination a basic of writing? I ask. How about audience? What about story? What is a basic, and what is not?

It should be noted that grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and paragraphing are not aspects of composition. They are aspects of language arts in the lower grades and linguistics and traditional, prescriptive grammar in the higher. They should be taught, but when we teach them, we are still not teaching writing. Teaching writing is something more akin to problem solving. When we write, we begin to reflect and discover, make connections, learn what we are really thinking. We weave. One of the ancient meanings of composition concerns the idea of weaving, of bringing things together into a whole. Compose.

Still, my questions leave most of the people I voice them to cold. Surely I’m missing what is obvious. But I don’t think so. Imagination, a quality and habit of mind and heart children lose the longer they are in school, may be what we need first. So I press for it anyway, in spite of the culture around me that cries for “basics.”

I propose that it takes imagination to project how another person, quite different from us, will respond to our ideas. Children are good at this. We can play games with them about this, and they will go along with us.

To teach writing, then, is to engage the imagination. It is to engage the ear, as with music. It is to engage the mind and the heart. It is to explain, certainly, but more often it is to proclaim and believe and doubt. It is to reflect, sometimes deeply, on why we are here, and what we should do now that we are here.

These, I argue, are the basics of writing.

My students will not agree. My culture does not agree. In a culture where science and exposition are the priority, I stand guilty of fantasy. Writing is at the bottom like brushstrokes or like learning musical stanzas. Writing is, like science, the uninteresting mechanical side of dullness. Certainly every watch maker, they argue, every scientist, every painter, every musician, learns the equivalent of this—the scale, the periodic table, the places of nuts and bolts.

But, I counter, the scientist dreams and fantasizes. The watchmaker dreams watches into existence.

Writers, I want to argue, do the same. As teachers, we could do worse than to coach them into their dreams.