Reading for Writing: Modeling the Modern Essay

Rationale

I have selected complex and challenging excerpts from The Norton Reader as essay models. I believe students can be taught how to read and write better by carefully imitating great writers as they develop their own writing style. Writing is inherently a social and political act. It awakes creativity. Children as young as 3 years old “write” before they can read; they create narratives by scribbling lines, loops, and stick figures with crayons on paper, tables and sometimes even your freshly painted walls. Why then, once children go to school, does the act of writing become difficult, laborious and boring? Why do so many students hate writing, especially nonfiction essays that demand an understanding of composition and text structures? I believe most students have an aversion to writing because once school begins, the focus has switched from sharing ideas, exchanging experiences, and investigating the world to the tedious tasks of correcting sentences, punctuation and spelling, worrying about the passive voice, appropriating a gender-neutral language, and constantly chasing that “perfect word” for that “perfect sentence” in that “perfect paragraph” to make that “perfect essay.” How daunting! I imagine children’s joyful spirit and curiosity about writing being dampened and crushed from the moment they step into school for the first time. As school continues, fewer and fewer students believe in their own writing and writing abilities. Suddenly, writing has a wrong answer, a bad label, a rubric to follow, and a grade attached to it. Children, along with their writing, are being judged and evaluated on an arbitrary scale devoid of enjoyment, freedom, creativity and originality. Using complex texts in small doses will direct students to focus on how words are used to convey their thinking rather than how words must be used to write a correct sentence without mistakes.

Most people would concur: “Writing is hard” or “Writing is not fun.” Sometimes children and adults are even afraid of writing. They express their self-doubts with statements such as “I can’t write,” “I am not good enough,” “I hate writing,” or “writing is not for me.” Arguably, the brains of students younger than 10 years old (4^th and 5^th graders) may not be mature enough to handle abstract thinking demanded by essay writing. Yet the National Common Cores Standards expect students to write opinion, informational and narrative pieces starting at first grade. The pressure to write, rewrite, and rewrite again, and again can destroy the joy of writing and make students feel inadequate. What if the same process is viewed as an experiment to embrace thinking in the quest to figuring out how to put thoughts into words? What if reading good essays by skilled writers, imitating their writing styles, and discussing the effects of words and sentences are the essential steps of learning how to write better? Even though the different modes of writing may demand different modes of thinking, I would argue that an essay can consist of narration, information and opinion. Creative nonfiction may be a world away from text-dependent analysis, but many different types of writing can also co-exist brilliantly in an essay. Nonfiction anthologies like The Norton Reader are packed with essays that weave personal experiences with convincing facts, poetic language, strong opinions and even viable solutions. If students write about themselves, their real-life experiences, and what they know best without the constant judgments, they will write in a more authentic way. In addition, the act of “students writing an essay together” can make the daunting task more enjoyable, more democratic, more socially interactive, and more culturally responsive to our increasingly diverse global society. If writing means using a mentor text as a roadmap, or working collaboratively with a more knowledgeable writer, children will be less afraid, and more willing to take risks with their writing.

Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) and Social Development Theory

Before we write, we think about writing, we may talk about writing, we may dream about writing, we may even read and write about writing. The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky developed a theory that emphasizes three aspects of cognitive development: social interaction, the more knowledgeable other (MKO), and the zone of proximal development (ZPD).⁶ It’s crucial for all learners, especially struggling students, to develop an internal dialogue before committing to undeveloped ideas in writing. When writing is personal and social, students will write more freely because they are writing about themselves and issues they care and know a lot about, and they can also ask each other for help. Quality writing demands the luxury of time to incubate internal dialogues, the comfort of a private space to write, and social opportunities to articulate, and share new ideas with others. Instead of being a lonely burden all the times, writing can be a private activity as well as a social event, an experiment, and a political act.

Benefits of Reading and Writing Personal Memoirs

One of the biggest benefits of writing a memoir is student and family engagement. Here is a real-life example from my class: On the last days of the 2018-2019 school year, I asked my students to write a series of letters: one to a classmate who had improved significantly, one to me, and one to their future 21-year-old self. These letters were basically essays-in-disguise. One of my students (a native English speaker) sighed and said: “Poems are easier to write [than essays] because I can write what I want,” and then my other students chimed in with agreement. From experience, I notice how children love to write poems and personal narratives.

Both genres encourage free thinking and imagination. With poetry, students know they don’t need to worry too much about grammar rules. Therefore, they are more engaged and less likely to censor new ideas before putting them on paper. Similarly, when teachers encourage this attitude of free thinking with personal narratives such as memoirs, students will take more risks in developing their own unique and authentic voice. The writer William Dean Howells (1909) refers to autobiographies as “the most democratic province in the republic of letters” and Robert Sayre (1977) labels American biography as the “song of ourselves.”⁷ Memoir allows individualistic, unrestricted and democratic expressions that are accessible and inclusive of people of different backgrounds in regards to race, ethnicity, religions, class, gender and sexual-orientations. Memoir is a genre that has long served as a threshold for most marginalized groups to gain status and recognition on the realm of literature.

Benefits of Public Argumentative Essays

The 2nd part of my unit is about writing arguments together to develop a public point. For the past ten years, I’ve used collaborative writing to include every student in the classroom as I teach them how to write text-dependent analyses, narratives, informational essays, research papers and opinion letters. The process of setting up the different teams can be time-consuming and challenging, but the amount of growth in students’ self-confidence and writing abilities is monumental and contagious. In a group of 30 students, I would usually divide them into pairs or five groups of six based on different topics, themes, main ideas or opinions. Suddenly, struggling students who didn’t like to write were talking a lot more, and they sometimes even argued passionately for their ideas to be included. High achievers were challenged by their peers to think more deeply and to elaborate in more details what they had written. Mastering the skill of arguments is essential in achieving success in a vast array of careers from science to social studies to math. Writing arguments help students to develop critical thinking and research skills, as well as the ability to defend their ideas to the opposition. In the practical world, the art of persuasion can boost greater self-esteem, help kids to deal with bullying in the playground and other day-to-day conflicts as well as open doors to future colleges and careers.

Benefits of Collaborative Writing (CW)

As technology advances, there is a shift to CW in the fields of academia, business, high-tech, research, as well as interdisciplinary careers such as journalism, political science, advertising, public relations to name a few.⁸ CW has become easier, quicker, more accessible and more fluid with the availability of mobile devices, social media and cloud-based formats such as Google Drive. In a CW group, student writers can rely on, support and challenge each other through a democratic process of sharing similar and opposing views. CW activities provide all writers, from emergent to advanced, a safety net to take more risks and utilize each other’s strengths.⁹ Writing together prepares students for higher academic learning and real-world employment.