Lester Smith is a Writer/Technologist at Sebranek, Inc., parent company of Write Source. He is a 1989 graduate of Illinois State University with a BA in English, Magna cum laude, Honors in English, University Honors Scholar, and with a minor in Spanish. In 1985, while pursuing his degree, he began working as a writer and editor for Game Designers’ Workshop in Normal, Illinois, which led to a design position with TSR (publishers of the Dungeons & Dragons® game) in 1991. He joined the staff of Sebranek, Inc. in 1998 as an assistant writer and was soon assigned Webmaster duties as well. In 2000 he led the creation of the company’s e-Publishing Department. Currently he maintains the company’s Websites and podcasts, troubleshoots technology issues, and contributes as a writer and editor to various projects. In his spare time, he is president of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.
Recently one of my novelist friends and I were out to dinner, discussing writing. He happened to mention being stuck at a spot in his most recent story and having called another novelist to talk it through. My first reaction was surprise, to think that one professional novel writer needed to confer with another. It jarred with my image of both these people as masters of their craft, each sitting in a solitary tower, quietly capturing words on paper.
Two years ago for Christmas, after much begging and pleading on my part, my wife bought me a Chihuahua puppy. Dobie’s an affectionate little guy (5.5 lbs. now, fully grown) who loves to perform tricks. When teaching him a new one, I can see in the glint of his eye his effort to puzzle out just what his big buddy the human expects this time. And oh the excitement in his stance, his wagging tail, his bark, when it becomes clear! Watching him celebrate his success (with much bouncing and licking of my face), I’m reminded of my childhood school days, the joyful feeling of having finished a test for which I was well prepared in a subject I loved.
Over the course of several entries on this blog, I’ve called into question the value of traditional approaches to teaching literature. My objection has been two-fold:
Q. True or false: The primary theme of The Great Gatsby is the disintegration of the American Dream during the very height of material prosperity in the 1920’s.
A. In the very act of asking that question, I have imposed two assumptions upon you.
1. You ought to have read The Great Gatsby.
2. The American Dream is related to an empty and unsatisfying material prosperity.
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?
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).
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?
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.”
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.
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