Writing is Dialogue § Philosophy

Philosophy

If my mother is to be believed, I never had a first word. I had a first sentence. This was an occasion for both surprise and relief, as I had apparently passed the stage at which most infants began talking. My parents had even discussed taking me to a specialist to see why I refused to speak. But the awaited moment came on a Sunday afternoon in the backseat of the family car. Leaving the suburbs behind, we moseyed through farm lands when, spotting a wooly creature, I pulled myself up to the window and declared, “Hi, lamb.”

Apparently, I was holding off speaking until I got it right.

I hope the story’s true, because it explains the way I learn. I didn’t know how to swim until I was twelve, and then I took to water like a turtle. I didn’t become a good student until I went back to college. And it took over two decades of teaching to develop the methods explained in this book.

In twenty-five years of teaching, you can get enough things wrong so that you start to ask “why” questions. Like, why were activities I enjoyed doing so much on my own—reading and writing—so boring for many students? Why could I get them to crank out perfect five-paragraph essays that nevertheless had all the scintillation of lead? Why did they turn in interesting creative pieces and then compose numbingly bad analytic papers? Why did they pass grammar drills and subsequently hand in work rife with comma splices, fragments and run-ons? Why, no matter what range of topics I suggested for writing, did their papers share the same dull, academic voice?

The closer we get to the truth, the harder it is to define, so I can’t reduce the lessons I’ve learned to a phrase or two, but I’ve come to believe the following about how students learn:

Students learn best...

...when they become active learners, not passive; when they apply, not merely regurgitate, their knowledge.
...when they understand a skill they are required to use.
...when they learn a skill and then apply it in varied ways.
...when they understand the relation between specific and abstract language.
...when they find skills reinforced and developed throughout a curriculum, not merely repeated year to year.
...when they see how unit objectives lead to course objectives which lead to program objectives, clarifying what they’ve learned and where it’s heading.
...when they move beyond memorizing rules to understanding the concepts behind the rules.
...when they see the connection between classroom writing and the larger goals of oral and written expression.
...when they read for tone, theme and style, not only plot.
...when they apply the thinking processes required in the classroom to their own lives, when they see the connection between classroom study and the world they must negotiate.
...when they are given freedom, and responsibility, to choose their own writing topics and decide how best to represent their thinking in written and oral form.
...when they encounter open-ended assignments, realizing there are no right answers, only well-defended ones.
...when they connect writing to self expression.

These observations are the foundation for the writing, models, methods and lessons discussed in Writing is Dialogue: Teaching Students toThink (and Write) Like Writers. Because writing is a highly intuitive process, it lends itself to guidelines better than formulae, and the point of a writing program is to write, not allow drills and exercises to dominate so that ideas sink beneath the muck of methodology. Teachers know the possibilities for exploration writing offers, but like many, I wonder at the emphasis on mechanics over expression, and the use of writing techniques that teachers, in our own writing, never utilize. If such methods are foreign to our love of composition, why are they appropriate for our students?