“Don’t say the old lady screamed—bring her on and let her scream.”
—Mark Twain
Be more specific. Give me an example. Show, don’t tell. How often does a writing teacher write or state these words during the school year? Too many times to count, right? We’ve heard of teachers who have had special stamps made because they’ve become so tired of writing “Give me an example” on student papers. The problem is, of course, that students too often state general idea after general idea in their writing without incorporating specific examples to support their generalizations.
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The National Writing Project (NWP) has caught my attention again. In my last blog entry, “Writing to Learn Revisited…Again,” I expressed my concern (alarm?) about an Education Week article discussing a writing-to-learn workshop for teachers in Oakland, California. As I stated, writing to learn has been around forever, and I thought it was pretty much a standard teaching strategy known about and used by most teachers. I also called NWP’s effectiveness into question since they are still spreading the word about writing to learn, some 20 or 30 years after it was first introduced.
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Here’s an intriguing approach to marking papers, and for convincing students to pay attention to those marks.
—Les
Every generation has a tendency to deride the next as frivolous and lazy. Over the past decade, for example, the phrase “short attention span” has become almost cliché in reference to young people. Those of us who grew up before the Internet and cell phones remember a time when people actually read books and wrote letters to one another; now, it seems, they read only blog entries and send 140-character text messages or Twitter posts. What, oh what, is this world coming to?
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Education Week published an online article called “Writing to Learn” on August 27. Since I write about writing, and believe strongly in writing as a learning tool, I was interested in what the article had to say. My guess was that it would explain that writing to learn is a common strategy used in today’s classrooms—and that it is proving to be an effective learning tool for students.
After all, “writing to learn” has been around a long time—at least 30 years. I came across the concept more than 20 years ago in a local workshop, and I still have my well-worn copy of Roots in the Sawdust: Writing to Learn Across the Disciplines (copyright 1985). We’ve included writing-to-learn strategies in our writing handbooks, starting with Writers INC, ever since the late 80s.
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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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Writing is essentially a solitary act wherein writers put their fingers to the keyboard or pen to paper to create something that is truly their own. But writing should also be a communal or shared activity. Most writers, in fact, do their best work when they have the support of their peers. As educators Dan Kirby and Tom Liner state in their book Inside Out, “…learners and writers need to construct personal versions of the world around them, but then they also need to submit those unique versions to peers for response, negotiation, and confirmation.”
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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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