Content Instructional Strategies
A 2017 New York Times article “Why Kids Can’t Write” by Dana Goldstein says recent studies have shown that most teachers lack both the training and confidence to teach writing in depth. In fact, “According to Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a scan of course syllabuses from 2,400 teacher preparation programs turned up little evidence that the teaching of writing was being covered in a widespread or systematic way.”18
Lack of specific pre-service training and limited applications for writing leads many of us to lack writing confidence. Specifically, deep confidence. As a writer I have typically felt competent more often than confident.
Reflections of a competent writer
I grew up diagramming sentences in school and practicing the rules of grammar. I have no memory of doing any creative writing until eighth grade when we had a “poet in residence” who came regularly to our English class. While I have forgotten details surrounding that experience, I have held onto a technique he taught us. Each day he would have us write for three minutes with the only condition being that we kept writing the entire time. Knowing the challenge that simple request held, he told us, “If you get stuck, write your last word three more times. By the third time something else will come to you.” He didn’t care about the format or the content, he just wanted us to get words and ideas on paper. From there we pulled language or ideas that interested us for our poetry and story writing. When the writing failed to produce anything we found worthy of using, we sometimes repeated the process.
At first we dreaded this daily practice but quickly learned to enjoy it. Not only did it give us freedom to just write our thoughts, it also freed us from “doing it wrong”. There were no constraints of sentence construction although we were invited to “fix that sort of thing” once the initial writing time was up. We subsequently created a bank of writing material that improved over time. Some days we wrote better than others or had more to say. Some days the writing looked like some bizarre Mad Lib19 entry with random adjectives and multiple words written in triplicate. When we looked at this writing for further inspiration, we were looking for what sparked interest or moved us, often sharing portions aloud. We became a community of writers through these practices. It is my only school writing experience that stands out to me.
Perhaps our poet in residence was familiar with the work of Peter Elbow. In the 1998 twenty-fifth anniversary edition of his book “Writing without Teachers”20 Peter Elbow reflects on his frustrations that brought him to writing the book initially and the techniques he used to overcome them. Not only is the sentiment essential to rethinking the way we approach rigor in writing but is itself an example of a well-constructed paragraph. He says:
I could write decent stuff if I let go of planning, control, and vigilance. I had to write down without stopping whatever came to me in my thinking about my general topic, and above all I had to stop worrying about whether what I was writing at the moment was any good. I had to invite chaos and bad writing. Then, after I had written a lot and figured out a lot of thinking, I could go back and find order and reassert control and try to make it good. If I wanted to get quality—indeed if I wanted to finish the job at all—I had to invite garbage and nonsense.21
Like many of our students, I grew up attributing some higher-level talent or gift to published writers. I viewed “Real Writers” as artists. I somehow internalized a “you either have it or you don’t” mindset when it came to published writers. I don’t mean to imply that I thought regular writers couldn’t grow and improve, but somehow that there was an upper echelon of writers that was unattainable without being naturally gifted. I gave up on being anything other than a technically good, competent writer. Unfortunately, many of our students give up long before even feeling competent.
How is it possible that I have so little recollection of writing instruction in school and yet still ended up feeling at least competent?
Well: I always got good grades on my writing in school; People have told me I’m a good writer; I’ve done very well with any academic and professional writing coursework; I enjoy writing (for myself); People ask me for advice about their writing; I like the way my writing sounds when I really work at it and the images I am able to create........create, create, create. And there it is! A whole bunch of nothing, ending with a maybe something…
Somehow rigor in writing instruction is associated with sentence correctness and students’ ability to perform well on isolated writing tasks, rather than doing the work of writers. Despite Peter Elbow’s observations and recommendations from fifty years ago, we are still waging this battle as evidenced by John Warner’s 2018 book, “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.” Warner argues that rather than focusing on constructing sentences as a starting point, we need to guide students to begin with an idea so that “the desire to share it provides the necessary intrinsic motivation to find the precise language to do so.” He goes on to explain that sentence writing challenges while obvious in young students, are truthfully still naturally present throughout writing experiences. In his strongest statements Warner says that we are withholding “the best part of writing – the ideas…the most pleasurable and motivating part” by first requiring students to perfect sentence writing. And most powerfully, “Writing is thinking, and I have yet to meet a writer who thinks in sentences. To suggest that we must know sentences before we start to write is a lie.”22
Reflections of a confident writer
I like the way my writing sounds when I really work at it and the images I create.
This is a key element for writers, enjoying the creative process. We want students to enjoy working to make the language sound a certain way, to create certain images, the way they imagine them. In his widely used guidebook “On Writing Well” William Zinsser tells us “I’m more interested in the intangibles that produce good writing – confidence, enjoyment, intention, integrity.”23
In the New York Times article mentioned above, one of the approaches to writing instruction was described as “A musical notion of writing — the hope that the ear can be trained to “hear” errors and imitate quality prose — has developed as a popular alternative among English teachers.”24 In seminar we also talked about a distinguishing feature of rhythm, a lyrical quality, that is often found in good writing. In his chapter on “The Sound of Your Voice,” Zinsser describes this as “a mixture of qualities that are beyond analyzing: [having] an ear that can hear the difference between a sentence that limps and a sentence that lilts.”25
When I work with my students to sound out words when reading I tell them to try sounding out the word with the different possible vowel sounds (a short vs. a long vowel sound) and see which way sounds correct when they say it or read it with the rest of the sentence. Another popular trick I use, and teach, is writing a word multiple ways to see which one looks correctly spelled. This is a visual rather than auditory check for correctness. These same techniques can be expanded to explore word choice, plus sentence structure and sequence.
The problem with these auditory and visual recognition strategies is the large number of children who simply do not have the background knowledge to make these distinctions. Often these students are English Language Learners, were never read to, have limited access to reading materials or even have other physical restrictions that limit their interactions with spoken or written materials.
I may not recall much about being taught writing growing up, but I have vivid recollections of how much I was taught about books. I was privileged to grow up in a house that valued and supported reading with lots of books. But even without that external piece, my school experiences were heavily focused on reading. Not only were we given opportunities to regularly read independently, we talked about stories, our teachers read aloud daily, we studied authors and classic literature. I believe that it was being steeped in examples of good writing that helped me discern whether I had succeeded with a piece of my own writing. Sharing mentor texts regularly, explicitly teaching their features in the classroom will help to build that recognition in all learners.
Metacognition – The Writer on Writing
Teachers know all about the “Think Alouds.” Describing our thinking as we read or write is probably one of the most common techniques we do share when it comes to our writing instruction. I think this is an area where our instruction would benefit if we purposefully “lean into it,” as our Seminar Leader Jessica Brantley would say.
The first part of that would be really digging into our own experiences and struggles with the writing process in an honest but hopeful dialogue. We can model critical but constructive self-talk surrounding the hard work of writing.
The second part of this involves insight from the experts. So many accomplished writers have shared essays on their personal writing experiences and processes. Unlike L. Frank Baum’s character, the mysterious Oz who urges us to “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”26 most successful authors are open to sharing their thought processes, tips and strategies that help them. Because teachers are expected to model our writing process, and think aloud as we do so, these successful writers provide mentor texts on metacognition. Joan Didion continues to share her writing reflections,
I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become…27
I think of my own misconceptions surrounding the idea that writers had some special gift I wasn’t privy to. I am reminded of Patricia Polacco’s autobiographical book, “Thank You, Mr. Falker” where the young dyslexic Trisha looks at the other kids reading aloud, staring at the top of their heads, trying to decipher what magic was happening inside.28 Students need and want to see inside writers’ heads, see how they came up with all those ideas and then shared them on paper.
Digging into the writers’ experiences helps us understand that revision is an ongoing process in writing, not a stage or something that happens after. When students perceive writing in distinct stages or as a single assignment task then they are very reluctant to make changes; they just want to be done. I wish I could share with you all the versions of this unit that have come before so you could see all the cuts, the patches, the reworks and reinventions. We need to share multiple versions of our writing with students. In his book “After THE END” Barry Lane shares that “even a first draft is a revision of all the words I have left to write.”29 He goes on, “Each word I write revises a hundred others I could have written, and when I go back to change passages I am always looking to measure what’s there on the page against the wealth of unwritten material floating in my mind.”30 If we think about the economy of language, words represent an “opportunity cost”; the words we put to paper come at the expense of the words we leave off. Revision is an exploration, an integral part of a writer’s craft.
Writers’ Journals
Authors are observers and recorders, actively investigating life. Model this practice. Teach your students to keep a writing notebook or journal. They should fill it with questions, ideas, quotes, perceptions and more. Joan Didion began her first notebook at age five. In her essay “On Keeping a Notebook” Joan writes that the content of her notebook isn’t necessarily “factual” but about how something felt to her, “…bits of the mind’s strings too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”31We can learn much from the types of information writers keep in their journals. Edith Wharton was a highly successful American essayist and novelist from the early 1900s. The expression “Keeping up with the Joneses” is said to be inspired by both her family and the society about which she wrote. Edith kept a composition notebook spanning 1924-1934 with the following opening entry: “Quaderno dello studente” – I like the name of this copy-book, which I bought here the other day. It encourages me to begin. Perhaps at last I shall be able to write down some disconnected thoughts, old & new – gather together the floating scraps of experience that have lurked for years in corners of my mind.32 Three years later, on the inside cover of the notebook, Edith added “If ever I have a biographer, it is in these notes that he will find the gist of me. E.W 1927.”33 Other writers have whole collections of journals. Ralph Waldo Emerson began journaling in college and filled a hundred volumes over his lifetime. Many of his essays were born from these journals which were then published in their entirety after his death.34 Norton’s Anthology also includes examples from Thoreau, Didion, Plath and more.
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