What’s Different about Writing?
Here’s something that has happened to me over and over. I meet someone for the first time. We start talking about our careers. I mention that I’m an English instructor. Immediate response: “Writing is in such a terrible state nowadays” or “Nobody knows anything about grammar anymore” or a similar comment about how frustrating my job must be.
My take on my career is very different, of course. (If teaching English was so awful, I would have chosen to major in a different subject!)
Yes, many students have difficulty with writing tasks, and yes, they don’t know much about grammar. But those two facts not constitute a reason for despair. To clarify what I mean, I’m going to use an analogy from ballroom dancing.
I want you to stand up, step away from your computer and take two steps forward and two steps back. After you’ve done that, you can come back to your computer and read on.
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Now I’m going to evaluate your four steps from the standpoint of a judge in a ballroom competition. Everything you just did was wrong. Your posture was off, you didn’t shape your feet correctly, your top line wasn’t strong enough…I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
How can I make those judgments without even having seen you take those four steps? Because everyday walking has almost no connection to ballroom dancing.
That doesn’t mean that ballroom instructors sob and wring their hands when a beginner comes in for a lesson. There’s no reason to expect someone to walk in the door the first time knowing how to move like a dancer who’s had years of training.
Obviously it helps if you have a background in ballet, but even then there’s a lot to learn. Flying around the stage on pointe shoes is very different from trying to move gracefully when you’re plastered up against a partner whom you might have met only seconds before and who may not know the patterns you’ve been taught.
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The same principle applies to beginning writers: Academic writing is very different from ordinary speech, even though they both involve the same language.
Students who walk into a high school or college English course have been using language since they were toddlers. They’ve mastered a wide variety of sentence patterns and a large number of vocabulary words. They know English, right? Wrong. When they submit their first couple of papers, they make the horrifying discovery that their work is full of mistakes. Much hand-wringing follows, and blame is assigned all around.
It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that of course there’s going to be a transition period for these writers. If we could all just calm down and stop making students feel stupid and guilty, we could skip the recriminations and start helping them become better writers.
Students (and adults who yearn to write) need an attitude adjustment too. They’re stepping into a new venture with its own rules and customs. There’s going to be a transitional period when it’s going to seem that nothing is going right. Students need to resolve to a) hang in there and b) absorb everything they’re taught.
Here’s a memory from my doctoral program. One night I ran into a fellow student who was finishing up his dissertation. I was just getting ready to start writing mine, and I asked him what the process had been like for him. I’d heard a string of horror stories about pitched battles between students and their advisors.
To my astonishment, he said it had been a terrific experience. “Really?” I gasped. Nobody has a terrific experience writing that blasted dissertation.
“I did some thinking about it right at the beginning,” he told me. “I figured this was my only chance to work closely with a group of world-class scholars on an important project, and I was going to take advantage of everything they could teach me.”
Wise words, wise student! And it also helps if you’re lucky enough – as both he and I were – to be working with advisors who realize that nobody starts out knowing how to write a doctoral dissertation. Bottom line: patience, persistence, and encouragement will win the day.
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Instant Quiz ANSWER
Don’t use an apostrophe to form the plural of a family name. Use “s” or “es.”
The Wilsons want you to babysit for them Friday night. CORRECT
What Your English Teacher Didn’t Tell You is available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon.com and other online booksellers.
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