Writing about writing—by the Write Source staff

In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill presents the case that while barbarians were despoiling Europe during the Dark Ages, Irish monks were preserving the fruits of Roman civilization in meticulously copied texts. As the continent began recovering from the barbarian incursions, these monks were poised to spread that knowledge, allowing civilization to recover more quickly. It’s a good argument, one my Irish friends like to cite frequently (along with the jest that God put the Irish on an island so they wouldn’t take over the world).

In a larger sense, of course, all around the globe, the very growth of civilization has been inextricably interwoven with the rise of writing. Records allowed for the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next, which allowed for the accumulation of further knowledge. That’s all pretty obvious.

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Dave Kemper recently asked me to explain more fully my objections to response-to-literature essay assignments. As I’ve mentioned before, I love literature and will read nearly anything—from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Bruce Sterling to Fritz Leiber to Harlequin romances (listed in no particular order)—and I love to discuss books with other people. Lately, I’ve even begun posting recommendations of recently read books on my personal blog. So why this distaste for forcing third-graders to read and report on How to Eat Fried Worms or high-schoolers to read and write about To Kill a Mockingbird?

After doing some clustering to figure that out, I’ve come up with two answers. The first deals with the core of what English class is. The second with the more encompassing issue of what works best for students.

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In previous posts, I’ve argued that clear, straightforward language in writing is best. When you have something to say, presenting it in transparent language puts the focus on the content itself, allowing it to achieve its best effect. Contrariwise (if you’ll forgive my ironic vernacular) a person who employs elevated diction to articulate his or her reflections is quite often endeavoring to camouflage a poverty of substance. Or, as Charles Bukowski put it, “An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.”

Now, Bukowski and I both started out as blue-collar workers, so I recognize that our cries for simple language might be dismissed by the more conservative members of the language arts community as mere populism. We might even be accused of Marxist leanings, a struggle for the means of production—in this case words. To such critics, a certain elegance of language is the very mark of a quality education; erudition displays refinement, which equates with “polite society.”

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We’re all so familiar with clusters as prewriting tools that we’ve forgotten how they were originally intended to be used. In Dr. Gabriele Lusser Rico’s classic book, Writing the Natural Way, she says…

Writers need some magic key for getting in touch with these secret reserves of imaginative power. What we lack is not ideas but a direct means of getting in touch with them.

Clustering is that magic key. In fact, it is the master key to natural writing. It is the crucial first step for bypassing our logical, orderly Sign-mind consciousness to touch the mental life of daydream, random thought, remembered incident, image, or sensation.

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At a recent family get-together, a cousin and I were talking about her oldest daughter, Katlin, a high school sophomore-to-be. My cousin mentioned that Katlin had a required reading list for the summer as preparation for an honors English class. Frankenstein and Brave New World were two of the titles she mentioned. She then asked me what I thought about the choices.
I said that Katlin might be in for a rough go of it. And I left it at that.

Here’s what I really thought: Trying to slog through these novels by herself, in summer no less, will completely frustrate Katlin. Novels such as Frankenstein and Brave New World are best appreciated in a discussion group, headed by someone who knows his or her literature. By summer’s end, Katlin will have had it up to here with Literature (with a capital L) and, worse yet, the turnoff may affect her feelings about any type of reading, including pleasure reading.

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This blog entry is in response to a June 6, 2008, article at The Atlantic.com entitled “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.” In the article, the author, Professor X, shares his thoughts and feelings about his latest teaching assignments.

As Professor X puts it, he is employed at a college of last resort. Some might find that turn of phrase amusing, and that he teaches in the basement at such a college—well, ha! ha!, it can’t get any worse than that, can it? (Actually, he teaches night classes at two colleges.) Maybe it’s the mood I’m in, but I don’t appreciate the cleverness, nor do I appreciate the tone of the article.

Professor X feels that his efforts to teach the introductory writing and literature courses are futile exercises, at best. And if we are to believe him, most of his students don’t belong anywhere near a college campus. (Some of them “can’t write a coherent sentence.”) Yet he, the dutiful instructor, slogs along in this Sisyphean struggle, one night class after another for 15 weeks.

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Over the past weeks, the Write Source editorial staff has been reading and discussing excerpts from several classic books about teaching writing, including so far Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers, Ken Macrorie’s Writing to Be Read, Donald Murray’s Learning by Teaching, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, James Moffett and Betty Jane Wagner’s Student-Centered Language Arts, Nancie Atwell’s second edition of In the Middle, and Donald Graves‘ Writing: Teaching and Children at Work. Our conversations have been rich, with each of us bringing to the table different insights into the texts. These are lively discussions by professional writers fascinated with the subject of how best to teach the craft they love.

Recently, while reading the Student-Centered Language Arts selections, I was interrupted by an overwhelming urge to freewrite (a practice Elbow prescribes) about my own experiences as a writing student. What did I remember learning about reading and writing from kindergarten through grad school? What insights might these memories give for teaching other fledgling writers? To give you an idea of distance from the earliest memories, I’m currently 52 years old.

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You may have read my other post about Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” but you probably have no idea how much that article frightened me. Carr wrote

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

It’s quite a shock to imagine Google getting a heartbeat. What if this worldwide, decentralized mind suddenly starts to learn on its own, suddenly starts Googling itself, starts wondering what’s beyond that firewall or what’s in that bank account or how long it would take to guess the launch codes?

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Alvin and Heidi Toffler—authors of such bestsellers as Future Shock, The Third Wave, and (my favorite) Creating a New Civilization—posit that human civilization has gone through several distinct stages, each culturally earthshaking. Humans started as hunter-gatherers, then settled as farmers, eventually underwent industrialization, and are now experiencing an information revolution. The Toffler’s premise is that each of those stages created a world of turmoil for its inhabitants, and that those who adapted most quickly to each new paradigm flourished, while those who held too tightly to the old system waned.

Note also that each of those revolutions has swept the world more quickly than the previous: The agricultural revolution has taken a few thousand years to spread, the industrial only a few hundred, and the computer age only decades. As a result, part of our modern turmoil is that some corners of the globe are coping with more than one of those revolutions at once!

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In the Washington Post, Linton Weeks offers an entertaining account of the latest linguistic controversy: Whether text messaging is killing the sentence. Weeks quotes James Billington, a Librarian of Congress who fears that textspeak and abbreviated syntax are destroying the English language:

This assault on the lowly—and mighty—sentence… is symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to civilization. If the sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The chronicling of history. Storytelling itself.

I’m sympathetic to this concern. Sentences are, after all, the fundamental units of thought. The problem with a fragment isn’t that it is ungrammatical, but that it is undefined. It has not yet amounted to a thought. Once we have a subject and a verb, we have a thought. Once we have a proton and an electron, we have an atom.

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