Rob King is the Editor in Chief at Sebranek, Inc., parent company of Write Source. He has 21 years of experience in the publishing industry, performing the primary edit on more than 100 nonfiction texts and 50 fiction titles. As a writer, he has contributed more than a thousand pages of instructional material to numerous projects and has published 20 novels, 4 novellas, 26 short stories, and 62 prose poems. In 1995, Rob founded the Alliterates, a group of fiction writers and poets who meet once a month to discuss writing. Rob has also taught two semesters of creative writing at Karcher Middle School in Burlington, Wisconsin.
Professor Mark Bauerlein of Emory University in Atlanta has recently published a book entitled The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). In it, he makes the case that Generation Y has been “stupefied” by technology, spending time on Facebook instead of reading books.
Hmmm. I remember spending time watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island and Hogan’s Heroes instead of reading books. (more…)
Last week, I spoke for career day at my son’s intermediate school, telling about the life of a working writer. About fifty kids from the school had signed up to hear me. They were so bright, so attentive, their eyes wide, their brains bubbling. (more…)
In the January 2009 edition of Esquire, the great American composer Philip Glass offers the following pithy observations:
I work every morning without fail.
You practice and you get better. It’s very simple.
I was not always the brightest bulb in the tree. I was a hard-working guy, but in my opinion, I was not one of the most talented people at Juilliard. I didn’t have that brilliance that some people really have, but I had a tremendous appetite for the work.
Motivation will make up for a lot of failings.
He may not have always been the brightest bulb, but now Philip Glass is more than bright: He’s brilliant. He’s one of only a handful of modern classical composers who have a household name.
But if he wasn’t born brilliant, how did he become brilliant? (more…)
A few thousand years later, the clever folks of Ur developed cuneiform writing. Then people had two options: either say “Ugh” or write “Ugh.” You said it if the person was standing there, and you wrote it if the person wasn’t. The choice was clear.
Now, after another few thousand years, the choices are anything but clear. A modern person can say “Ugh” in person or by phone or via voice mail, can email “Ugh” or IM it or text it or blog it or microblog it.… People nowadays even network “Ugh.” Take a look at MySpace. It’s a million pages of “Ugh,” combining words, pictures, audios, videos, links, games, and clubs.
These are the “new literacies“—all the communication options available to modern people who want to get their “Ughs” across. Many students are already avid users of these new media. What they need is not instruction about how to poke someone on FaceBook but rather instruction about whether to poke someone on FaceBook.
All modern communicators need help deciding the best medium for each message.
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What makes human beings different from other great apes? Here are some human capacities that have been suggested:
- Tool use: Sorry. Chimps on Madagascar make and use stone tools.
- Language: Nope. In addition to their native hoots and howls, great apes have learned to use—and create—hundreds of hand signs.
- Self-awareness: Wrong again. Though monkeys don’t recognize themselves in mirrors, great apes do.
- Empathy: Tell that to Koko the gorilla, who spent weeks mourning the death of her kitten, All Ball (which, by the way, she named).
- Learning: Um, have you ever heard of “monkey see, monkey do?”
- Hairlessness: Well, I’m not the right guy to advance that claim for humanity.
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As promised in my last post, I’ve provided here a few practical strategies for connecting your writing and reading programs:
- Use the same terminology for writing and reading.
When writing fiction, students should use the words of literary analysis: character, setting, plot, theme, and so forth. So, too, when reading nonfiction, students should use the traits of writing: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. By using a common vocabulary throughout the language arts curriculum, you not only avoid confusion but also help students see themselves as writer-readers and reader-writers.
- Use the same graphic organizers for writing and reading.
The graphic organizers that help students gather details during prewriting can also help them analyze details after reading. For example, if students use a Venn diagram to prepare to write a comparison-contrast essay, have them also use a Venn diagram to analyze a comparison-contrast essay. Graphic organizers, after all, are mind maps—ways of making thinking concrete. Using the same strategy to synthesize ideas as to analyze ideas helps students understand that reading and writing are opposite vectors of the same process.
- Write the forms you are reading, and read the forms you are writing.
Plan your reading and writing time to complement each other. If you are reading short stories, write short stories. If you are writing expository essays, read expository essays. Each activity deepens the other. A student who has read “Tyger! Tyger!” by William Blake may love it, but the student who has written “Wombat! Wombat!” in satirical response understands the poem from the inside out—and will never forget it.
- Use literature to demonstrate writing techniques.
Use literature to show the traits, concepts, skills, and techniques students are using when they write. For example, when you want students to learn how to create narrative tension, introduce excerpts from short stories that use this technique. Then lead a discussion of how the authors do what they do. When teaching about answering objections, select editorials that do just that and discuss how the answers strengthen the writers’ positions.
- Use writing to explore literary techniques.
When students not only learn about literary techniques but have to use them in writing, they internalize the concepts. So, if you want students to understand a literary technique such as foreshadowing, have them write a paragraph that uses foreshadowing. When you want students to learn about symbolism in a piece of literature, have them create their own symbols and use them in a short piece of writing.
- Be the bridge.
In the end, though, the best integration of reading and writing in your classroom comes from you and your students. Programs can only go so far. They are repositories of models and assignments, but you and your students are the reader-writers and the writer-readers who bring the language-arts community to life. If the books get in your way, shove them into a corner and sit down with your students and just write and read, read and write. Words are your friends.
—Rob King
Let’s face it: Language arts instruction is tough. In history class, you have people, places, events, and dates to rely on. In science, you have theories and laws and pictures of the Horse-Head Nebula. What do you have in language arts? Words, words, words.
Or, to quote from Hamlet II, ii, 191-195:
Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
Hamlet: Slanders, sir. For the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams; all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down, for yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.
Polonius: [Aside.] Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.
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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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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
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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.
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