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A common approach to writing that students will encounter in a college first-year writing course—that every piece is a custom job, created by a unique intelligence (the writer), in the service of the needs (purpose) of a specific audience—is almost entirely foreign.
If an essay is written and no one is there to read it can it be considered an act of communication?
The first problem (among many), though: computers can’t read.
LOL
Perelman’s BABEL Generator is capable of spinning out sentences such as this: “Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent. Humankind will always subjugate privateness.” Babble indeed, but when tested against the algorithmic grading product used as a backup to the human scorer on the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), Perelman’s BABEL Generator babble was scored a 5.4 out of 6 and was marked especially high for language use and style.29
For example, consider a basic assignment in a college first-year writing course: an article summary. The goal is for the student to read the argument of another writer, and then distill that argument to its essence while hewing as closely to the original writer’s meaning as possible. If a writer cannot accurately convey the ideas of others, they will not be able to use those ideas to shape their own expression. The students I have worked with over the years often struggle with this assignment. In their previous experiences, many of them have been asked to prove comprehension at the level of “I
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comprehension. They are comfortable repeating what they’ve heard/read but less experienced in articulating what a text “means.” The “close reading” featured in standardized reading assessments doesn’t help much, as those questions often ask students to zoom in on individual bits and pieces at the sentence level and the effects or meaning of those bits and pieces independent of the larger argument. Put another way, they’ve spent a lot of time examining trees without being required to describe the forest.
I did not thrive at diagramming sentences. I learned enough to fake it, but I could never figure out how the geometric lines on the chalkboard or in my notebook related to what I loved to read or tried to write. But diagramming sentences is part of school, so it must be important. It turns out, not so much. There is no demonstrable link between being able to diagram sentences and being able to write effectively. This fact was codified by the National Council of Teachers of English in 1963, seven years before I was even born.
The particular power of the folklore surrounding the teaching of “grammar” is significant. Some of you right now are disbelieving the NCTE’s resolution (just as you disbelieve the one-space-after-a-period matter), even though it is based on a meta-analysis of dozens of studies seeking to measure the impact of different pedagogical strategies on helping students learn to write.
Knowledge of the ineffectiveness of direct grammar instruction was well known as far back as the 1940s. Lou LaBrant, a high school teacher/researcher, wrote in a 1946 edition of The English Journal, “We have some hundreds of studies now which demonstrate that there is little correlation (whatever that may cover) between exercises in punctuation and sentence structure and the tendency to use the principles illustrated in independent writing.”3
Those who hold on to the notion that students must learn the “basics” of grammar before allowing writers to move on to the more difficult work of expressing ideas are denying those students access to the experiences that make us want to learn to write. It is the equivalent of music students being confined to the study of sheet music, without ever being allowed to play an actual instrument.
One three-year study covering students from ninth to eleventh grade divided students into three groups. One group experienced traditional, isolated grammar instruction, another experienced alternative grammar instruction, and the third had no formal grammar instruction, instead substituting additional reading and creative writing. The result? In terms of writing skills, there were no significant differences among the groups. Unfortunately, the two groups who studied grammar walked away hating English.4
As contentious as teaching writing seems, people outside the field are often surprised by how much agreement exists among those who deeply study the discipline.
Sound writing instruction emphasizes the rhetorical nature of writing. Sound writing instruction considers the needs of real audiences. Sound writing instruction recognizes writing as a social act. Sound writing instruction enables students to analyze and practice with a variety of genres. Sound writing instruction recognizes writing processes as iterative and complex. Sound writing instruction depends upon frequent, timely, and context-specific feedback to students from an experienced postsecondary instructor. Sound writing instruction emphasizes relationships between writing and
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This is teaching writing—understanding where something went wrong and helping the author set things right without ever grabbing the club and swinging at the student’s ball yourself.
Teachers in the United States spend 38 percent more time in the classroom than those in other developed countries.
School days cannot start at 7 a.m. Homework should not gobble up hours upon hours of post-school time. Activities pursued in the name of boosting college applications need to be weighed against the cost of sleep deprivation and the resulting stress, anxiety, and depression.
Emdin was uneasy with this approach from the beginning: “The teachers’ venting sessions reminded me of my experiences in high school and how I was forced to obey rules without an opportunity to question whether they supported the way I learned. As a high school student, the more I engaged in school, the more I learned about the rules that guided the institution and realized they ran counter to the ways I experienced the world.”6 Reflecting on his life as a student and his work as a teacher, Emdin realized, “I had been trained my entire life to believe that becoming something other than who I
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We seek to increase educational challenges while simultaneously decreasing student stress and anxiety related to writing. We seek to change the orientation of school from only preparing students (poorly, as it turns out) for the indefinite future to also living and learning in the present. We seek to provide experiences designed around learning and growth, rather than giving assignments and testing for competencies. We will end the tyranny of grades and replace them with self-assessment and reflection. We will give teachers sufficient time, freedom, and resources to teach effectively. In
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But when students say a class was “hard,” they often mean “confusing” or “arbitrary,” rather than stimulating and challenging.
And of course, this approach is validated by standardized tests that favor surface-level “correctness” over depth of ideas. It’s a good strategy to help students make things that at least resemble writing, which is pleasing indeed when they were previously making things that did not even resemble writing.
Nevertheless, the sentence is not the basic skill or fundamental unit of writing. The idea is.
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS
Telling students “First you must know your sentences and only then can you start to write” gets writing backward. When we have an idea worth expressing, the desire to share it provides the necessary intrinsic motivation to find the precise language to do so. Sentences matter very much, but they are not first.
By making sentence mastery a prerequisite to actually getting to the best part of writing—the ideas—we are withholding the most pleasurable and motivating part of the act itself. Writing is thinking, and I have yet to meet a writer who thinks in sentences. To suggest we must know sentences before we start to write is a lie.
But before thinking about writing, I want to consider the question in general: Under what conditions do you do your best work?
To begin to turn student writers into writing-related problem solvers we need to substitute new values for the old. Rather than standardization, efficiency, and proficiency, we should be concerned with choice, curiosity, risk, and the building of a critical sensibility.
In a third grade reading test, when previously identified groups of “poor” readers were allowed to read a passage about soccer, the poor readers who already knew and understood soccer scored better on the test than previously identified “good” readers who were unfamiliar with soccer. The test was testing soccer knowledge, not reading ability.
The same divide is evident in writing. When a writer is searching for meaning because they lack underlying knowledge or expertise, the writing will be less fluent on every level. What looks like a problem with basic sentence construction may instead be a struggle to find an idea for the page.
