From The Chronicle of Higher Education comes a plea for more writing in college.
A worthy cause, I’d say.
Julie Reynolds, associate director of undergraduate students at Duke, says writing reveals students’ thinking process. “Anywhere we can make their thought process visible is where faculty can have the greatest impact in their teaching,” she says. So writing becomes a diagnostic tool, useful in the sciences and math as well as the arts and social sciences.
My thoughts:
True, writing reveals a person’s thinking process. True, wrestling with words forces you to wrestle with your subject. So writing ought to play a central role in a student’s life.
But how?
Writing for the sake of writing might not be a great idea. To write well, you need to understand how words and ideas work. The old saying that “practice makes perfect” is not quite right. If your practice a poor technique, over and over, you may end up in worse shape. You need to practice, consciously, using the best techniques.
So let’s not just assign more writing. Let’s make sure we teach all the basic skills of writing and give students strategies to apply those skills.
Stanley Fish, while dean at University of Illinois in Chicago, discovered that only four out of 104 “writing” courses actually taught writing technique. Did the students in the other 100 classes learn how to write? Doubtful. They just continued using whatever half-baked approaches they learned in high school.
You can teach anyone to write well, quickly, with the right technique. Of course, a person’s writing will only be as good as their knowledge about the subject and their willingness to apply writing skills. That takes hard work. But you can teach the skills in a matter of days.
Most high school and college courses teach writing — to the extent that they teach technique — focus on ACADEMIC writing.All too often, students learn a simple format (like the five-paragraph essay) and teachers use a protocol (like the six-traits method in high school). This can be abstract — and, for most students, besides the point.
In The Elements of Writing — a program I developed while teaching at Yale and SUNY-Purchase, working on my own books, and developing seminars for professionals — I take a different approach.
I begin with this simple truth: Humans are a storytelling species. Nothing matters more to us than constructing narratives — and we do it well, usually with little or no help. So when you engage learners with storytelling techniques, they come alive.
That simple truth leads to another, more surprising truth: Once you’ve mastered the basic skills of storytelling, the more abstract skills come more easily. Why? Because the basic structure of stories offers a “template” for all the other skills of writing.
The best writers give every level of writing — sentence, paragraph, essay, section, etc. — a narrative thrust. They make everything, at every level, a “journey.” They take the reader from one place to another, different place. When students understand the narrative structure of all writing, they can convey ideas with clarity and verve. Even challenges like grammar, punctuation, and editing come more easily with this approach.
Learning with this approach makes writing more relevant and the skills more transferable to the “real world.” And the reality is that almost all professionals have to write — a lot — in their jobs these days. If they learn a simple, natural approach, they’ll succeed. If not, they’ll struggle.
