At the beginning of the school year, I ordered this classic from Donald Murray. I first read this my first few days of graduate school when my adviser loaned me his copy.
It was one of the first texts that really opened my eyes on how to teach writing. And, more importantly, how not to teach writing. And I realized I had not been teaching writing very well at all.
You see, I fell into the five paragraph theme format trap. I never wrote like that in college. But once I started teaching, I stumbled across a graphic from the MN BST packet that showed the “hamburger” method of writing - topic sentence, three supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence. It doesn’t take much to leap from that to introductory paragraph, three supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion.
This was so simple to teach. And it felt like I really was teaching writing, for I could give students specific feedback on their drafts and grade each essay in about three minutes.
I promised my kids (and I still do) that I won’t make them do anything I won’t do. So when I assigned an essay, I wrote one too.
It was quite easy, in fact, to crank out a five paragraph theme. It was almost like filling in the blanks or coloring inside the lines.
But a funny thing happened. Though it made writing easy for me, I stopped writing except when I had to.
What Murray’s book made me realize was that while teaching writing as a formula may make it easy, it makes it neither good nor enjoyable.
No wonder I stopped writing. There was no joy in it. No voice. No revelation.
That’s why Murray titles his text, A Writer Teaches Writing. Real writers don’t write five paragraph themes. No one reads five paragraph themes. No one wants to read a five paragraph theme. And that’s why I grew so tired of reading those essays, even if they were easy to grade.
Now that I focus on voice and style over form, grading essays has become more arduous that ever. But that difficulty is far outweighed by the voice, style, and personality of my students’ papers.
I was thinking while I re-read the book that I'd put down some of my favorite quotes and offer my thoughts on them. And, when possible, include student examples and evidence from my teaching. Here are some of my favorite parts so far.
Meaning is not thought up and then written down. The act of writing is an act of thought . . . We do not know what we want to say before we say it; we write to know what we want to say.
And this gets right to the heart of the problem with thesis/support formulaic writing. That form requires the writer to start out with a thesis. But how do you know what you think when you haven’t written much?
Why not let a student write an exploratory essay in which you allow them to literally think through their writing . . . and leave it all in the essay. Otherwise, they have to write draft after draft determining what they think. Then when they have all of that writing done, they have to take it and chop it up and force it into the thesis/support format . . . and make it look like that was what they thought all along.
Where is the joy in the exploration and discover? That’s all left on the cutting room floor.
I had a student early on write about the death penalty. He eschewed the thesis/support form and instead wrote about why he was against the death penalty. However, in his writing and research, he saw example after example of horrible crimes. And he actually ended his essay stating that despite his thesis and all of this examples, as a result of his research, he was actually changing his mind and was now for capital punishment.
Imagine that in a thesis/support format: a conclusion that totally runs counter to what the entire paper was about! But I loved it. He actually learned something, which I found quite rare when teaching the five paragraph format.
Traditionally, emphasis is first on vocabulary, spelling, usage, mechanics, and the conventions of manuscript presentation and later on organization, style, and appeals to an audience.
I think I set a record for vocab and grammar worksheets my first three years. I mean I had a cabinet FULL of them. I had my kids circling nouns, underlining verbs, putting boxes around adjectives and drawing arrows to the nouns the adjectives modified. It was quite the show.
And I felt like I was teaching.
But then again I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
I should have had the kids actually writing. But that was too simple.
God forbid they write an essay before they can tell me which noun is modified by which adjective. But, then again, that was how I was taught writing.
Actually, I learned little about grammar, despite receiving a ton of worksheets on this in high school.
I honestly think that’s why I loved writing so much. I didn’t have the joy of writing drubbed out of me by grammar.
So when I began teaching I thought by God my students are going to learn grammar! Never mind that I excelled in college without being able to tell you that a subordinate conjunction begins an introductory adverb clause or that a compound-complex sentence contains two compound sentences and a clause.
So why was I so determined to drub the joy of writing out of my kids with grammar worksheet and grammar worksheet?
Who knows. But it was wrong.
Here’s why - I had a student named Jack. He could circle verbs, put boxes around nouns, and underline adjectives. But his writing never improved. Thankfully, he had great voice and style, but his writing never took off like I wish it would have.
The problem was that Jack could dissect a sentence but I didn’t do a very good job of getting him to apply those skills to his prose.
I should have done this in reverse. I should have taken his writing and used that to teach grammar. I should have filled my filing cabinet full of student writing that they used to learn about grammar and tossed those damn grammar worksheets in the trash.
As Murray states, Non-traditional composition teaching usually reverses the process [of teaching grammar first] and emphasizes personal content and personal voice first, working backwards from global concerns to the particulars of language and manuscript presentation.
The writer sits down intending to say one thing and hears the writing saying something more, or less, or completely different. The writing surprises, instructs, receives, questions, tells its own story, and the writer becomes the reader wondering what will happen next.
What a great way to think of the writing process. What a great way to get writers to grasp the concept of audience and how often (as Peter Elbow asserts in his essay “Closing My Eyes While I Speak”) the writers themselves are their own audience.
Plus, why do people really write? To discover what they think. To communicate. To be part of something. To argue. To learn. And sometimes, when writing you have that wonderful discovery that the writing is coming alive and going off in a totally different direction. That is far more magical than any five paragraph theme ever written.
Again, as Murray observes, The first responsibility of the writing teacher is to experience this essential surprise. You can’t teach what you don’t know.
Last night’s reading left off with my favorite topic: voice.
Voice is the quality, more than any other, that allows us to recognize exceptional potential in a beginning writer; voice is the quality, more than any other, that allows us to recognize excellent writing.
Here are two samples of writing alive with discovery and voice.
Make It Rain
College Composition II 2.19.10
1 comment:
I gave up on teaching writing the way I'd been taught in my first week. (I tell about that experience at http://www.you-can-teach-writing.com/about.html. ) I didn't discover Murray's book until a few years later. I thought it was great — until I tried it in my classes. Then I decided his methods needed a little fine-tuning.
My own approach has evolved to something more like that of Wiliam F. Irmscher. Do you know his book Teaching Expository Writing? Like Murray's book, it pre-dates the Internet, multimedia, and always-on information sources and needs to be read in that context.
Murray had a string of publishing credits in an era when publishing was a far more leisurely business than it is today. Murray himself taught small classes of upper level students; if he didn't think someone was adequately talented, prepared, or motivated, he showed that student the door.
I didn't have that kind of situation. I typically teach first-year college students. I've never had an English major and rarely have anyone in my classes who has any interest in writing. My students are there because they are required to be. When I ask what they'd like to get out of the class, they say they'd like to write better for their classes and for work.
Every year I find my students are less able to think in a linear fashion. Before students can write to learn about a topic, I have to teach them to think strategically and linearly. Murray's students (and yours, if the writing sample is representative) are already able to do that. Mine have to be taught thinking skills.
Even if my students were able to think strategically, I doubt they would put in the time that Murray's write-to-learn approach requires. The biology teacher or marketing manager is not going to read 20 pages (or even 2!) to find out what Caitlin's point is. And Caitlin isn't going write 20 pages (or 2) to find out what she thinks and then rewrite the paper the way the prof/boss want. (That's assuming the prof/boss will let her express her personal opinion.) People need a quicker way of discovering what they think than writing essays.
You ask "why do people really write?" Most people write because they have to. In the sectors in which I've worked (medicine, financial services, manufacturing, training, hospitality, government, education, publishing) that's the reality. People don't get to pick their writing topic. They don't get to pick their format. They don't get to choose their audience. They don't get to write what they think. They don't get to use their own voice.
Over 40 years, I've come back to a far more structured approach to teaching writing not because that's what I'd enjoy, but because it fits what the military calls "the situation on the ground." I teach the five paragraph essay format unapologetically because it works beautifully when taught as a systematic way of thinking about information. To put it another way, I teach the five paragraph essay as a process rather than a product.
I tend to use write-to-learn activities more in informal writing than on graded assignments. I've moved from pick-your-own topic assignments to having students write about topics within my curriculum: language, literature, communications. Some of my writing prompts are specifically designed to have students learn about a topic (there's no "right answer") while others are more on the order of the typical essay test question.
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