We live in a golden age of bad writing instruction. Learning to write for school was never a great path to excellent writing, but now that we have added learning to write for a standardized test, things have gotten even worse. The internet is a blooming garden of terrible writing, 150 word articles that have been stretched to 1,000 so that readers will have to click through more ad-displaying pages.
What is a writing teacher to do?
I've discussed some obstacles that have to be removed in order for real writing instruction to flourish in a classroom, but what positive steps can a writing teacher take? After thirty-nine years teaching in a classroom and writing in the world, these are the ideas that became the foundation of my practice. Here are eight rules about writing for teachers to internalize and make part of their practice (I'll be back with Part Two in a few days).
1) There are no writing prodigies.
In math, music, and art, there are tales of children as young as five showing mastery and skill that stunned their audiences. Mozart's excellence was evident from the first days he could walk and plunk. Bizet started studying at the Paris Conservatoire when he was ten years old.
But there are no great works of literature written by a five year old. There are no classic novels composed by a nine year old. Despite attempts to teach reading and writing to younger and younger children, as if we can somehow force language prodigies to appear, human beings still start out inarticulate and unable to write a clear thought. All the successful and great writers who ever existed have one thing in common--at the beginning, they stunk. Nobody skips to the head of the line in the writing world. Every writer is on a long journey from stinkitude to at least some level of competence. Every student who is bad today could get better tomorrow--and some will get a lot better. It's a mistake to look at any young writer and say, "This student will always be lousy."
2) Writing is craft.
Too many people make the mistake of imagining that writing requires an inciting flash, a blinding ka-blam of enlightened lightning. But that model is self-defeating. Your plumber does not say, "I can't fix your sink today; I'm just not feeling inspired." A cabinet maker doesn't say, "Sorry, but your kitchen just isn't speaking to me."
The inspiration model provides an excuse not know your tools, but you need to know as many tools as possible because writing is framing and planking and soldering and trimming and altering until you've got it right. Worse, the inspiration model encourages writers to skip the hugely important step of revision. "If I'm really in the zone, it will just come out perfect the first time," is baloney.
3) Ideas are the basic building block.
If you are of a certain age, you may have learned composition via the brick-by-brick method. First, you learn parts of speech. Then you learn how to write sentences, and once you've mastered sentences you can try paragraphs and then once you're a paragrapher, you can try a full essay. The premise here (and there are still people in the writing pedagogy world who consider it gospel) is that sentences are the basic building block of a piece of writing. I disagree. The basic building block of a piece of writing is an idea.
Yes, it's important to know your tools (see above), but trying to build a piece of writing without an idea is like trying to build a house without construction materials.
This point speaks to the fundamental purpose of writing. In writing for school, your purpose is to complete an assignment and satisfy the teacher. In writing for tests, your purpose is to go through some motions to satisfy some unseen, unknown test maker. But in writing for real, your purpose is to express an idea that you have, a point that you want to make, an impression or sense that you want to present to the world. Your purpose is to say something that you want to say. As generations of students can attest, it is entirely possible (sometimes even preferable) to do your writing for school or test without any idea of your own cluttering up your brain. Your purpose is to say what someone else wants you to say. That's not writing for real.
4) Form follows function.
It is impossible to know the shape of your piece of writing until you know what you want to say. Once you know, the form can be grown to suit the content. To decide, before you even know what you want to say, that your essay will be composed of five paragraphs, each with a pre-determined purpose, is to throw up your hands and give up on actually expressing yourself. You are no longer asking, "What do I want to say," but are instead asking, "What can I use to fill in these paragraph-shaped blanks?" Everything in your writing should live or die based on whether or not it helps you say what you want to say.
Those are the first four rules. You can find the other four here. While you're waiting, I recommend John Warner's excellent Why They Can't Write. Warner and I have been, in our separate corners of the world, working on many of the same questions and arriving at many of the same conclusions, and he's written a fine book on the subject.