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.

General Writing Advice, Part 4

This fourth blog in a series (non-consecutive, I should add), will seem pedestrian to some readers, and I have to agree that it is. But the other day it happened to me again, and I decided that this needs to be said. By way of preface, let me add that because I both teach and try to produce writing, I am perhaps too aware that writing is not fully respected by most as a discipline, not like physics or math, and that writing is taught in the schools as though most people will not be expected to learn or use it.

Writing in the Red
The other day, a colleague from another department at our university heard me say that I was revising my textbook.

“You’re proofreading it?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “I’m revising it. I’m developing new content, adding a new chapter, and rearranging some of it.”

I was about to explain the purpose behind my revision, but she appeared suddenly puzzled, so I let it drop. But my friend’s inner-paradigm for writing was obvious: Write one draft, proofread it, and then hand it in. Further “writing” (read “revisions”) means you’re not a very good writer.

Old School
This is the pattern we are still taught in the schools. Write a first draft (this is called “sloppy copy” in elementary school), then proofread it, and then hand it in. Second efforts only involve cleaning up what is sloppy.

This has been the problem I’ve tried to address in my textbook for First Year College writing, which, as I’ve already noted, I’m revising now. General Study writing is what most people remember from their public school experiences. General Study writing emphasizes a curriculum of grammatical correctness, even though there is language in the California standards for teaching process.  

Red Pens in the Closet
The goal I’ve long had for my textbook is to make it a bridge from this reductive view of writing over to the way real writers work, which is messy and personal. A few of the chapters work to do this, but my goal is for the whole book to become a solid introduction to writing as a real subject. This is why I’m revising it.

Writing is difficult to teach and made even more difficult in high school where the curriculum is rushed to meet the standards, most of the time is spent on reading literature, and the classes are too big.

My students, persuaded by twelve years of General Study writing, get their rough drafts back, correct the few errors I’ve noted, ignore my comments in the margins for more thought development, clearer organization and transitions, and then don’t understand why their grade doesn’t go up. They are not interested in further exploration or discovery.

But that’s just the problem. How do you teach thought development? How do you teach seeing and reasoning, or the imaginative qualities that go into thinking about an audience beyond the teacher with the red pen? How do you teach these skills when all of your students and their parents don’t believe that they have anything to do with your discipline?

Old Habits, New Curriculum
The old ways of thinking die hard. Even when I help writing teachers to symbolically stop using the red pen and start emphasizing skills like invention and revision, the change is slow.

I can only speak for myself here. I remember the first time I was told that marking up papers in red wasn’t an effective way of grading, that I needed my students to attend to larger, more complex issues with their writing. So I got rid of my red pens, used green for a while, and then discovered that I was using green to mark errors with.

Old habits die hard.

 

 

The Book on Dating and Writing, part 1

General writing advice is probably as useful as general dating advice, though to be honest, I didn’t do much dating in high school. So I really can’t say much about it.

What I remember about dating in high school looks today like a series of rather dumb stereotypes. Given the rigid concerns about how I should have behaved on the big prom date, with the expensive dinner and romantic candlelight, it’s no wonder that it didn’t happen for me. I liked girls. I thought I loved a few. But I didn’t really know how to get to know them through the rules of dating. After all, they were rules about looking and sounding good. I didn't really know how to have fun with them.

I suppose the same thing could be said about those school book reports and research papers, which were all probably necessary on some level. But while all teachers taught against using the first person pronoun “I,” none explained invention or incubation—what creative people really engage in to get good ideas. While all my teachers taught about paragraphs, none taught anything about genre.

As old people often say, if I had known then what I know now--that dating is not about behaving according to some previously agreed upon code--I might have been happier in high school.

And not to be dull, but if I knew then that writing was more interesting than rules, I really might have done it more.  

Prescriptive Dating Rules

The romance with rules begins in junior high school with the five paragraph theme. It continues in high school as we are taught to write research that at least “sounds” objective, though we are not taught then to look at more than one position on an issue.

Teachers seem to care most about structure and correctness, even when they claim to understand process. So we are taught to write final drafts before we know what we might care to say about something. As long as we do not use the first person pronoun “I,” they let us get by.

We are told that each paragraph has one idea, and that idea should be expressed in seven sentences (some handbooks say eight, some say six).

And students in most public schools, if they learn to write anything, learn the five paragraph theme, which they practice over and over again. Then they graduate and find out no one reads five paragraph themes except test specialists.

Mark Twain never wrote a five paragraph essay.

Instead, high school students should spend time in high school learning a few of the important genres of essays and even short fiction, and they should practice them.

Situational Dating

Though Strunk & White’s Elements of Style is a famous and even very good book on style, most of it traffics in advice of a general sort. “Omit needless words,” for example, is one famous bit. But to get to the place where I can follow this advice, I need to have written a lot of words to find out which are needless. Before I start, I can’t subtract from zero. Style isn't the starting point of good writing.

The best, most general writing advice is probably this: Write everyday; don’t worry about writing badly, but try to learn to improve; find subjects you care about, and write to convince others, through your writing, that your subjects matter.

As much as some like to reduce good writing (and dating) to rules, following rules isn’t going to solve all our writing problems. They will lead to neither art nor falling in love. If rules did the trick, wouldn’t there be more lovers and more art in the world?

(Coming next: Part 2)

Revision/Repentance: Sorting Through a Contrast

This past week involved a struggle with a writing project. I’m working on a novel, and after getting some great feedback on it last week (see last blog), I found myself going back to the drawing board on a few things. Writing is like that, though. I’m used to it. Some people might look at this as similar to “repentance” (I say this because it is common to look at having to do something over again as a form of punishment). But I try to avoid attributing moral or spiritual guilt where none exists (more about this later in the blog). And I don’t rewrite to cover errors or mistakes, as though I’m working on a math problem; I rewrite because I’m learning more about the material I’m working on. Revision, or re-seeing, concerns getting closer to the vision I had for writing in the first place. Nancy Sommers, a Composition specialist, calls this part of the writing process, when we return to earlier stages of the process, “recursive.” That is, it involves returning to earlier stages of a writing process as a part of moving forward toward a better draft.

Most of my work this week could be called recursive. I literally went back to the drawing board, to stage one: I added a new chapter, which I then spent most of the week writing and giving shape to. But in writing this chapter, I also learned more about other parts of the book I’ve already written, and I also found myself adding new scenes to other chapters already written. Many people might look at that as failure, or as too much work. But my understanding of the world of my novel is deepening; my rewriting, rethinking, re-inventing, I hope, will reflect this. The whole week seemed worth the effort.

We tend to look at many aspects of life, especially those concerned with learning and growing, as consisting of stages of development. Once we pass through an early stage, we are done with it. This model might work for childhood development, though I’ve also heard of it being criticized. As for writing, the stage model has long been criticized, and yet it is also deeply entrenched in teaching writing in the lower grades.

The stages model suggests that five stages are needed to write an essay: Pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. The assumption with this model is that when we finish “pre-writing” for an essay and move to “drafting,” we are finished with “pre-writing.” And once we finish “drafting,” we move on to “revision” and don’t need to “draft” again. This is to teach these five stages as “non-recursive.”  

This is simply too neat to be true or accurate. All of the writers I know don’t write in stages. They don't see returning to the drawing board as a form of “repentance.” They do return to planning again, they do re-draft whole segments of their work, not because they are terrible writers, but because they are good ones, and in writing the first draft, they realized what their piece was really about.

This seems to be true of most things. When we are involved in a new endeavor, we have only a sketchy understanding of what it is to look like and how we will pull it off. So we plow through until we realize we’re off track. We return to the beginning with a better understanding of what to do.

This is the part of revision that I suppose cuts across into religious thought. Although revision should not carry the moral repugnance of repentance, repentance does resemble the recursive element of revision. Repentance is a turning away from what we’ve done and a turning back to what is perceived as the right path. I suppose for most of us, repentance carries all of the childhood memories of shame, disgrace, and, yes, moral repugnance. But there is also this promise of a better understanding than we had before--yes, it does resemble a new revision.

Aside from the harsh, haunting childhood images, repentance could also be seen as a lot more like revision, as a new opportunity to do things better, the way they should have been done the first time. Certainly, if I’ve done real harm to someone, it's probably a sign of health that I feel remorse.  

For those of us who follow a developmental, stages model for faith (I usually do at an unconscious level) and assume we're really moving far along and getting deeper and better, we may want to question our model. Christianity without repentance is like writing without revision.

If you’ve looked at as many essays as I have that were written by student writers who don’t revise because they believe revision is only for bad writers, then you’ll understand that it is not a pretty picture.

Most of the time, spiritual progress does resemble writing. And sometimes, as C.S. Lewis once noted, to go forward I first have to go back.