Writing

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Stop Teaching Writing?

In the recent edition of Education Week (September 21, 2011 ), Paula Stacey describes the many travesties of teaching writing inspired by a decade of standards and textbooks that function like cookbooks.*  Most of these anecdotes are from her personal teaching experience, and they ring with authenticity. Her conclusion is to “Stop Teaching Writing” and merely ask questions and consider the answers.  She does not define the characteristic challenge of teaching writing, which is, to echo the venerable Don Murray, “Teach the Process, Not the Product.”

The problem is that teaching writing is not teaching to the standards or teaching by the book. It is teaching the writer first,  then the writing. A  great writing teacher views the writer as an actor, the writing as the rehearsal, and the standards as the critics, who like to have the last word. In the tentative bursts of language students produce in writing classes, the teacher sees a performer with talents that can be coached. The standards are the afterthought, not the dialogue in the drama. The textbook is the proposal, not the script, for the play.

The teacher seems to be a director in this metaphor. When actors praise directors, they always seem to appreciate their ability to bring out the best in the actor, to understand the capabilities the actor brings to the performance. They never comment on the good reviews they received, because of the director’s savvy anticipation of the critics. Rather they admire the director’s making the most of what they bring to the drama.

Another reason to like this theatrical metaphor is that rehearsals become the focus of growth.  Rarely will anyone pay to see a rehearsal, but if you wanted to see how a play comes alive that would be the place to be. No one expects perfect performance in rehearsals, but what you can observe is the evolution of the actor and character as they perform the same scene over and over again. So it is with writers and writing.

Educators have been more fond of metaphors of teachers as sculptors or master gardeners. Although these analogies ennoble the profession, attributing depths of understanding and skill to teaching, they fail to characterize the student as an agent of learning. Statues and lilies have very little initiative in their growth. They appear more as artifacts fashioned by the skill of the artist. These metaphors miss the point about teaching writing. It is very dependent on the participation of the writer.

When teachers formulate writing, they minimize that participation. Yet every writing teacher is prey to this tendency, because every teacher wants to make learning easier for students.  The good writing teacher will read the results of these formulations and consider why the writing seems lifeless or so uniform throughout the class. The answer will often be traced to the dimensions of the writing assignment or the graphic organizer that choked the writing in its attempt to provide structure.  Teachers with the souls of directors will bring a new approach to the next rehearsal.

Unless directors are not teachers, then writing can be taught.  Like the performance, writing is taught in the rehearsals with the focus on the actor and the actor’s capabilities. The actor is never asked to  be a macho super-hero if he is built slightly with a boyish face. The actress is not required to rely on feminine wiles, if she is tall and muscular. The director teaches to their strengths, while coaching their flexibility.

So, if we are not obsessed with our reviews or expect our performers to excel at their weaknesses, we can teach writing.  It may not look pretty, but that’s what rehearsals are for.

* http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/09/21/04stacey.h31.html?tkn=LLWFXCotiHDKc1Q1skAZmvCV5dLFk4ogMpLQ&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS1

 

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The Deliberate and the Driven

To be college and career ready writers, students must take task, purpose and audience into careful consideration, choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

They must have the flexibility, concentration, and fluency to produce high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline and the capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing over multiple drafts when circumstances encourage or require it. (“College and Career Anchor Standards for Writing” 63)

Reading the Common Core State Standards, teachers of writing come away with a mixed message. Writing is described as rich in thought and content, but sometimes it is quick and dirty and sometimes it is careful and reconsidered. Both are true, but  it leaves open  the question of how to teach writing.

The above passages, from the  CCSS sidebar titled “Range and content of student writing,” illustrate how our national standards for writing are torn between the deliberate and the driven. In the first sentence, the words “careful consideration” and “deliberately” stand out.  This emphasizes that writing is a process. In the second sentence, the key words seem to be “high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline,”  which suggests the need for a “quick and dirty” approach.  However this is followed by a disclaimer which urges the “capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing.”  Then,  lest we become too leisurely in the process of writing, the final phrase cautions “when circumstances encourage or require it.”

The beauty of these contradictions about “range and content of student writing” is that they are probably all true. Writing is both deliberate and driven, according to the purpose and occasion. It would be petty to insist that the standards for writing be unwavering and consistent, because writing is not like that.

What does annoy me is that we assess only the “driven” side of writing, the world of desperation and deadlines. The language about “high-quality first draft text” is an obvious rationale for the impromptu essay, written in thirty minutes or less and unapologetically assessed as “first-draft writing.” This how the ACT, the College Board, and most state assessments evaluate writing.   The question is “Of what social or professional value is first draft writing?” Or “Why be driven?”

Some professional roles dictate a “high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline.” Newspaper reporters come to mind.  Office scribes — secretaries, document drafters, those who write for their bosses — may be required to write under short deadlines.  For some reason, this remarkable skill is often uncompensated and yet under-girds the other forms of writing that allow newspapers to publish and businesses to function.  It is a valuable skill, but not always valued.

Every other kind of writing falls under the “capacity to revisit and make improvements,” and it is the kind of writing most respected in journalism and commerce.  Feature articles, Op-ed articles, Topical columns, Investigative articles. Project or marketing proposals, contracts, human resources documents, end-user documents, public relations documents.  No one writes these in one draft or under unreasonable time constraints. Oh yes, deadlines will sometimes be sudden and arbitrary, but no one considers high pressure the formula for good writing. And writing in journalism, law and business is incurably collaborative. Numerous pairs of eyes must examine work in progress and editors may insist on putting their mark on it, even a controversial comma.

In the “real world” the writing process is alive and well and respected. Only in school is it considered a sideline, producing the kind of writing pored over by teachers, but rarely high stakes, rarely a standard for “success.”  The writing that counts is “driven” writing.  It is the kind of writing most students claim they are good at.  Why? Because that is the kind of writing we assess for success.  To many students the quickwrite is the money genre, the one that counts.  Students who claim they can write well, but need time, seem to be asking for special consideration. They are somehow deficient because their writing process is an actual process.

To be college and career ready writers, students must take task, purpose and audience into careful consideration, choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

Deliberation. To me that describes what writers really do.  It comes from a Middle English word meaning to “balance or weigh.” Writers balance “task, purpose and audience . . . words, information, structures and formats.” That’s a lot of balancing, and it will not be easily executed in thirty minutes. It will be executed  . . . deliberately.  Writing teachers’ message to their students is to “trust the process.” The message of our standardized assessments is “Get ‘er done.”

. . . choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

It is comforting to see deliberation validated in the Common Core State Standards. It gives dignity to writing and the teaching of writing.  Now if it would only be reinforced by the Common Core State Assessments. The Deliberate . . . not the Driven.

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Learning: Infection or Assimilation?

It is probably much easier to contract a disease than to absorb a vocabulary word.  Although learning may be compared to being exposed to a virus, such exposure is temporary for the mind as a virus is short-lived in the body. Emerging research on memory and effort to learn confirms that the “exposure” version of learning is less effective than the recursion of learning.

Cognitive researchers report that studying large chunks of information repetitively may be more effective than committing smaller chunks to memory. In “The Ease of Processing Heuristic and the Stability Bias: Dissociating Memory, Memory Beliefs, and Memory Judgments” Nate Kornell and colleagues Alan D. Kastel, Matthew G. Rhodes, and Sarah K. Tauber observed that the number of times a vocabulary word was reviewed had a stronger effect on memory than the larger font size of the vocabulary word.

In the Psychological Science study, Mr. Kornell and researchers from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Kent State, and the University of California, Los Angeles, asked online participants to predict how easily they would remember vocabulary words after studying them once or multiple times. Some of the words were presented in the standard font size on the person’s computer screen, while others were presented four times larger—something that makes the text feel easier to process but prior research shows does not improve memory. In addition, for some words, participants were told they would be allowed to study more than once. (Education Week, April 22, 2011).

The key finding was that students predicted that they would learn better from the larger font size than the repetitive learning from the smaller font size. Students associate ease of learning with memory retention. The testing of the words showed the inverse was true.  Students learned the words better with each time the memorizing task was repeated, rather than the increased font size.

Although the tasks of memorizing and writing are dissimilar, the recursive nature of writing may explain why students assimilate information better by writing about it. In the recent study “Writing to Read,” research synthesizers Steven Graham and Michael Hebert  reported that numerous studies prove the effectiveness of writing about a text for reading comprehension (Graham and Herbert 201o).  Among the recommendations from their meta-analysis:

HAVE STUDENTS WRITE ABOUT THE TEXTS THEY READ. Students’ comprehension of science,
social studies, and language arts texts is improved when they write about what they read,
specifically when they
• Respond to a Text in Writing (Writing Personal Reactions, Analyzing and Interpreting the Text)
• Write Summaries of a Text
• Write Notes About a Text
• Answer Questions About a Text in Writing, or Create and Answer Written Questions About a Text (“Writing to Read p. 11)

The act of writing demands a better assimilation of a text than merely reading it.  Even the basic challenge of summarizing a reading, demands a re-shaping of the information in a shorter format. In that re-shaping, something is added to the inert language on the page. The reader is assimilating the information by writing about it. Anyone who has paused to write a reflection or written response to a reading knows this feeling. It is more like digestion than infection. It becomes part of you.

But writing is not copying. Copying has been discredited as learning and certainly receives no welcome on an assigned paper. We call that “plagiarism.”  Writing is much harder, and the current research says that harder is better for learning. Learning is gradual, recursive, and challenging.

In the standards-driven school it is helpful to remember these principles of learning. Students will not reach the standards of complex learning by consecutive weekly injections, beginning with Standard #1 and injecting a different Standard every week until the day of reckoning.  Both writing and learning are gradual, recursive and challenging.  Both the body and mind follow this principle and both grow through assimilation.

Finally, this argues for writing across the disciplines. Writing as re-shaping is probably our most ready instrument of slowing down learning. Thoughtful writing. Writing that exasperates both student and teacher, because it is harder to compose and harder to read.  The resistance in both student and teacher is the signal that learning is happening. The student is constructing meaning and the teacher is construing it.

As one writes and the other reads, assimilation happens.

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A Shared or Shackling Curriculum?

The call of 75 national leaders for a common curriculum to accompany the emerging national standards for English language arts and mathematics should be considered judiciously by educators.  The position that schools should categorically resist a common curriculum for some fraction of the school year may be too extreme. However, the impact of such a curriculum on the individual classroom may be seriously underestimated by its proponents.

Curriculum reformers  need to borrow a phrase from the physician’s oath: “First, do no harm.”

School reformers at the highest levels usually underestimate the disruption that a “voluntary” curriculum can cause in K-12 classrooms.  What is pronounced as a friendly suggestion comes down through superintendents and principals as a high priority mandate to teachers. Why? Because their schools will now be judged by how well they perform on the goals of this “voluntary” curriculum.  Curricular pressure on teachers is completely understandable, in this case, because superintendents and principals are judged entirely on their students’ performance on the “voluntary” curriculum.

Moreover,  the ELA and mathematics standards now being touted are a culmination of numerous prerequisite standards that are not firmly in place in some schools, especially struggling high schools.  Take the new standard for reading that involves analysis of so-called “foundational documents” of U.S. History:

Analyze seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (including the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, , and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address) for their themes, purposes and rhetorical features (Reading Standards for Informational Text, 6-12, #9)

As worthy a goal as this appears, it comprises so many sub-goals that it might generate a whole new course of study: 1- arcane vocabulary (“a well-regulated militia”?) 2- rhetorical strategies (ever read a “declaration” before?) 3- historical context (what was happening before that “Second Inaugural Address”?) 4- ambiguity (why does no one agree on the First Amendment?) 5- genre (what is  the effect of a”preamble” and the “amendments” on the whole?) 6- syntax ( how does the adverbial clause affect the main clause?) 7- themes (how is the Red Badge of Courage connected to the Inaugural Address?)   8- context and interpretation (how has the meaning changed over time?)

Sometimes I think curriculum and standards writers imagine that topics will merely be “covered” in the classroom and students will be tested on the gist of the meaning. These same writers will then complain that students do not read closely or rigorously and thus stumble on the challenging tasks presented by international tests of reading. Because the curriculum and standards writers have no, or very distant, classroom experience, they forget that “covering” a text does not produce good readers. When new and historically remote texts are added to a curriculum they multiply the topics and the time needed to address them. Nothing worth reading  should be merely “covered.” It should be studied.

The time consumed by these curriculum “suggestions” displaces effective curricula, which may involve students choosing texts to read, genre for writing, and language strategies to address, related to these choices.  The growing edge of writing and speaking, especially, involves reading and writing about non-canonical texts, i.e. texts that relate to students’ daily experiences.   I know curriculum writers tend to belittle young adult texts, even though they are proliferating in subject matter and quality. They assume students are not being challenged by age-appropriate subject matter.

But students learn to write and speak by addressing books and topics from their own experiences, topics which include, conformity, integrity, decision-making, respect, loyalty, independence. These lessons are assimilated and expressed through age-appropriate reading and viewing.  Writing and speaking are complex skills that are first tested on familiar ground before racheting up the difficulty of reading and listening.  Active classroom teachers understand how to bring students up to more challenging texts by “successive approximation.”  Those who abandoned teaching years ago have forgotten that teaching is a continuum of experiences from the familiar context to the remote centuries and cultures. These familiar and age-appropriate texts should not be carelessly discarded in favor of new curricula.

New curricula have a ripple effect on existing curricula, starting as a trickle and ending with a tidal wave.  Curriculum writers may anticipate the trickle and perhaps the stream of curricular change, but seldom do they understand the torrent of prerequisite goals they have unleashed with their “modest proposals.”  They expect to influence the teaching of English and mathematics, but they have no concept of how they may throttle the curriculum from top to bottom.

If a “shared curriculum” can be introduced with the caveat that the best of local curriculum can be preserved, then the change could be beneficial. We could have cross-district and cross-state dialogues about how to infuse these new topics with the old.  We could have celebrations of successful learning units around these topics.  We could have the joy of shared goals, successfully implemented.

But a shared curriculum requires respect for the those who implement it. It should come in increments, with funding for teachers to develop their own units, with  grace periods for implementation, and with caveats for school administrators who fret about test scores. It should be shared constructively and deliberately with schools, not delivered like a subpoena.

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Critical of Critical Thinking

The most troubling question about the study “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” is that Bob Herbert, New York Times columnist, like most of his colleagues, does not for a minute question whether the “critical thinking” of college students has been adequately measured by whatever assessment was administered.

It is indeed troubling that “Thirty-six per cent of the students said they studied alone less than five hours a week.” And perhaps alarming that the same students are pulling an average 3.16 GPA.  There are some disclaimers that might be made about “studying alone,” because colleges encourage study groups and collaborative effort is considered a crucial skill of the marketplace.  Did they ask how many hours were spent studying in groups?

But more troubling is the undisputed claim that “after the first two years of college, 45 per cent of the students made no significant improvement in skills related to critical thinking, complex reasoning, and communication” and that two years later the percentage had only improved to 36 per cent.

Does anyone know how these critical skills were assessed? Has anyone taken such a test, in which “critical thinking, complex reasoning and communication” were validly measured? I have not investigated the testing instrument used in this study, but I would think someone would, before proclaiming that college students are dumber than they used to be.

Suppose the assessment of critical reasoning was the time and accuracy it took to fill in a crossword puzzle with the content knowledge expected of college students? Suppose it was a version of the Miller Analogies test, with content expected of a liberal education (be sure to cover art history and music) ? Suppose it was a thirty-minute essay question asking for the causes of terrorism in the Western world? Ask yourself, college graduates, do you want your critical reasoning skills assessed on any one of these tests?

The irony is the utter neglect of critical evaluation of a study that purports to measure the critical reasoning of college students.  How can we claim to know such things without knowing the nature of the assessment? The news media are the most uncritical arbiters of news about education in the literate world. They accept every test at face value. Heaven forbid we might test journalists this way.

I admit I am disturbed by the findings of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, because, regardless of the validity of their thinking assessments, where there is smoke, there is fire.  I try to learn what I can from studies that probe the learning habits of college students.

But I think it either hypocritical or delusional that the news media in general and Bob Herbert, in particular, would report on studies of student competence and knowledge, without asking if the tests were valid.  This is a classic case of uncritical thinking.

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Politics and Education: A Failed Marriage

Politics and education just don’t mix. The disconnect between so-called budget-reforming governors ( particularly in Wisconsin, Indiana and New Jersey) and the national sentiment about teachers shows that politicians do not get education.  They view it as a budget item, rather than a national priority.

Public opinion polls consistently support teachers, especially local teachers, and the current N.Y. Times poll  supports their right to bargain collectively by 2 to 1.  Although Governors Walker, Daniels and Christie have tapped into the budget-cutting spirit of their constituents, they are taking on the wrong adversary, when they seek to de-professionalize education.  They are bringing a machete into microsurgery.

Pay attention to the destructive impact of government on education in the current fiscal climate. New Jersey’s teachers have been publicly excoriated by a governor who presumably wants to recruit better teachers to his schools. Providence’s mayor has laid off an entire teaching force, clearly a publicity stunt, and thoroughly demoralized an entire school system. The governors of Indiana and Wisconsin have attacked the collective bargaining rights of their teachers, because they were  not willing to make wealthy tax-payers help offset the deficit.  And our Congressional representatives have blithely wiped out funding for critical literacy programs, in particular the National Writing Project, because we can not afford $30 million to fund the most successful professional development program in the United States.

In Linda Darling-Hammond’s study of three countries with superior performance on the Program in International Student Assessments exams, she found several shared national policies on education. In a comparative study of Finland, South Korea and Singapore, she found that all three countries actively recruited and paid for the education of superb teachers for their schools, and that they separated the national administration of schools from the political process.

The study is summarized in Chapter Six of Darling-Hammond’s book The Flat World and Education, which highlights major differences in the recruiting, educating and mentoring of teachers between three nations and the United States. Regarding “National Teaching Policies” she says they

recruit able teachers and completely subsidize their extensive teaching programs, paying them a stipend as they learn to teach well. Salaries are equitable across schools and competitive with other careers, generally comparable to those of engineers and other key professionals (193).

Teacher education is modeled on the education that the professional ministry wants throughout the primary and secondary systems, and it continues into the early years of teaching where expert teachers are paid to mentor the first- and second-year teachers in the most difficult years of professional orientation.

But the national administration of education in all three countries is also de-coupled from the political institutions. This strategy affects the entire program of teacher education.

these systems are managed by professional ministries of education,which are substantially buffered from political winds. Frequent evaluations of schools and the system as a whole have guided reforms (193).

The reforms to schools and professional development of teachers in these three countries are a remarkable contrast to the reform incentives currently engineered by federal and state governments in this country. See Darling-Hammond’s remarkable book for the details (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010).

When will our lunacy stop? When we can perform a decisive poli-tectomy on our education system.  Politicians have mucked up our national program with alternate diet and binge budgets, with short-term reform programs, with pandering to the testing establishment, with demonizing the “enemies of reform,” and by declaring we will have to do better with less.  How would that fly in Finland, South Korea, and Singapore?

Teachers know they can do better, more than any politician could imagine. They just need the opportunity. They need better leadership. The marriage of politics and education has failed miserably.  Set them free to do what they do best.

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The Mustard Tree

The kingdom of heaven  is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches. (Matt 13:31-32)

The notion of productivity is hard to define in education. Should schools be measured by the number of graduates, by the advanced degrees of their teachers, by the scores achieved by students on standardized tests, by independent observations of accrediting agencies?  None of this really captures the productivity of schools.

But the National Writing Project, a federally funded professional development network, has a simple formula for productivity. Invest in the professional growth of individual teachers with an aptitude for leadership and then support their growth and dissemination of effective teaching practices in local schools. The investment begins every summer with a 4-week institute for the development of writing teachers and continues with the graduates (called “teacher consultants”) developing their skills as writers, consultants, and teacher researchers both as an organic group and as coaches and workshop providers in local schools. The investment is $25 million, a mustard seed in the enormous dissemination of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Currently there are 7,000 active teacher consultants disseminating the mustard seed of “effective practices in the teaching of writing” in the schools they serve and in other local districts. These consultants of the National Writing Project reach 120,000 other teachers in a given year and teach 1.4 million students.  This is the definition of productivity: 7,000 teachers reach 17 times their number through professional exchanges and reach 200 times their number in students.

Is the instruction any good? The Local Sites Research Initiative has made eight studies of the writing of students in Writing Project classrooms with the following aggregate results:

The results, taken across sites and across years, indicate a consistent pattern favoring the NWP. For every measured attribute in every site, the improvement of students taught by NWP-participating teachers exceeded that of students whose teachers were not participants. Moreover in 36 of the 70 contrasts (51%) the differences between NWP participants’ students and the comparison students were statistically significant” (LSRI 3)

By every measure, the seeds of the National Writing Project’s investment in teacher leaders have been super-producers, and the production has consistently grown from its modest beginnings in 1974 in Berkeley, California to a 200-site network today.  This is the nation’s longest enduring professional network, a network that has leveraged federal support for the past twenty years to yield this gratifying fruit.

In the weeks that follow, the funding of the National Writing Project, a pittance at $25 million dollars, will be in jeopardy as Congress swings its reckless budget axe.   It is easy to overlook the brilliant success of the tiny mustard tree, overshadowed by the immense orchard of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Not every seed out of that orchard has been productive.

When the axe swings in the neighborhood of the professional development of teacher leaders, let it pause before the mustard tree of the National Writing Project.  That tree is home to teachers, students, and even their families (through the grafted programs of family literacy), and it is one of the great over-producers in American education.

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The Seed Among Thorns

What is sown among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful” (Matthew 13:22).

The Parable of the Sower tells us everything we need to know about teaching.  It’s not the seed we sow, but the soil it falls on.  And the corollary to that is: There are no sacred documents, but there are sanctifying and corrupting documents.  So we should stop grasping at symbols and instead preserve the spirit that gives them life.

The U.S. Constitution received a lot of symbolic attention at the opening of Congress, but even more serious scrutiny as we heard Congresswoman Giffords read the First Amendment with great conviction.  We heard  it in the context of a citizen violating her right to speak and assemble, indeed violating her right to live. And then we heard it in the context of a national conversation about how we should speak and the limits of political discourse. That has been an inspiring conversation.

When citizens talk about what free speech means, then we are revering the Constitution, not when we give it a public oration, congratulating ourselves that we have a splendid document to govern us.  We revere the Constitution when we ask ourselves how its seeds fall among us, how they invade and transform our hearts.  Our country has had a period of serious self-examination, because of the events following the reading of the First Amendment, but not from the words of themselves.

The words themselves may sow corruption. Before 1964, the Constitution did not protect the voting rights of all citizens. Before 1920 the Constitution did not protect the voting rights of half of its citizens.  It was good seed, but it fell in bad soil. But some of the seed fell on good soil, and it produced the Nineteenth and the Twenty-fourth Amendments. The Constitution would be sham without them.

The First and Second Amendments to the Constitution have been driven north, south, east, and west in attempts to justify what citizens wanted and believed.   Opponents on both sides of political controversy have invoked the same amendments to their advantage. Corrupting and sanctifying. That is how laws get made and rights are protected. To invoke those amendments as though they inherently protected our political convictions misses their point. They are the seeds sown by our Founders. We are the soil they fall upon. We should be more concerned with the soil, than who owns the seed.

Let’s stop invoking the Constitution as if it were the guarantee of everything we want. Let’s stop demonizing those who disagree with us as though they were the enemies of the Constitution. Let’s stop using the Constitution as a symbol and remember that its value is in how we live it.

Jesus compared the word of God to seed. If the word of God is no more than seed, which is barren without soil, how can we presume that the words of men, however eloquent, can be any more than that? How can we use that word against our fellow citizens, when we are all soil, all the resting place of seed, the producers of fruit?

When we are considering the limits of free speech, we might consider if we are the soil for our treasured documents or the thorns.

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Engfish

Almost fifty years ago Ken Macrorie invented a term for a pretentious and vapid style of writing that secondary and college teachers unconsciously reinforce in their push for formality in student prose: “Engfish.”  It is writing that goes through the motions, but discloses nothing, writing that skims the surface with cliches or empty words. In Uptaught Macrorie describes how a student essay inspired this term:

This girl had given me a name for the bloated, pretentious language I saw everywhere around me, in the students’ themes, in the textbooks on writing, in the professors and administrators’ communications with each other. A feel-nothing, say-nothing language, dead like Latin, devoid of the rhythms of contemporary speech. A dialect in which words are never  “attached to things,” as Emerson said they should be (18).

This style, unfortunately, often gets the “A’s,” because it sounds important and frequently shows a command of mechanics. As Macrorie observed, it pervades all levels of education. E.B. White fought it with prescriptive advice in The Elements of Style and Richard Lanham located it in the upper levels of bureaucracy and called it “The Official Style” (Revising Prose, 1999). It is hardly limited to struggling college freshmen.

Almost exactly two years ago, I confessed to my own addiction to Engfish as a high school student. In that blog, “The Science of Writing” I revealed:

I fancied myself a writer in high school, but when I look back at my preserved fragments I am shocked by the pompous and impersonal style that was rewarded by my teachers. In a series of responses to college admissions questions, I pontificated.

Question #1: Why do you want to go to college?

“The most evident purpose of the collegiate experience is to broaden the scope of education while making it especially relevant to a field of study. I sense the crying need to systemize [sic] the great chaotic whirlpool of information into the universal outlook of college training and impending need to study seriously my chosen field of work.  I expect college to carry me beyond education to the developing of a technique of study.”

One might argue that the first person singular is present in this excerpt, but I refuse to accept that cold, pretentious voice as my own. I want to have compassion on that sixteen-year-old with lofty dreams of college, but I feel completely alienated from that affected style, that pretend academic diction. If I were this kid’s teacher, I would tell him to write about why he loves the New York Yankees or pizza, get him grounded in real language about real experience.  Maybe I could deflate his diction and connect with his passions.

So this is origin of my contempt for Engfish. In high school I was considered one of the best writers in my class, wrote for the yearbook and the school newspaper, won a local essay contest,  all for the publishing of Engfish.  I was a master of saying nothing in the best style.  I shudder to think of what my Freshmen English teachers thought when my beige prose arrived in college.

Ultimately I learned to write as a reporter for the Spectator, the college newspaper, and later I retrieved what was left of my voice in a summer at the Boston Writing Project.  I learned very little about writing in actual writing classes. I felt betrayed by the system that let me loose on the world with nothing to offer but Engfish.

The National Writing Project chopped away at this unfortunate style by declaring that “all teachers of writing should be writers.” This meant we delivered our prose to real readers and heard what they heard. Ultimately this was my cure for Engfish. The summer I attended the Boston Writing Project I was among a host of would-be writers who would only affirm what touched their reader sensibilities. We learned to write what we felt without embellishment, and we discovered how powerful that could be.

Since English teachers are often the perpetrators of Engfish and its followers, I have made it my life’s mission to go after it. Not to punish students for giving in to its seductive rhythmic nothingness, but to help them find the language that still lives in them, what Macrorie has called their “voice.” This term is not without controversy, but I’ll save it for another blog.

For today I offer  the funeral rites for “Engfish” from Macrorie’s entry, May 7, 1964, “The Day We Killed Engfish.”

Not until I heard the third paper that afternoon did I realize that everyone on the grass had quit gazing around and was listening hard. Each student had written a powerful short paper and I had broken through and the students were speaking in their own voices about things that counted for them (21).

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The Day of Small Things

Time for reflection and repentance for not sustaining this conversation. Since the Fall Semester resumed, I have been mostly responding to news stories that outraged and intrigued me. Today I will try to  pick up the thread I dropped back in July: the joy and satisfaction of writing.

My text is Zechariah 4:10 – “Who despises the day of small things?” This verse drops into the midst of chapters on the apocalyptic visions of Zechariah, so I am not even sure how it sits in context. But it seemed to address the problem of writing for fun, rather than work.  “Small things” are the subjects we can write about daily, without addressing the “big things” of school reform, pronouncements of the Secretary of Education, and the failure of the “Dream Act.”  I have been guilty of dealing only with “big things” in this blog for the past six months. For this, I repent.

“Small things” are the topics of “expressive writing,” as I commented in the summer. The writing is done only for the satisfaction of writing, not for ulterior motives. It is both the most self-indulgent and the most rejuvenating writing we do. As I wrote in July,

With the proliferation of e-mail, texting, and blogging, this daily writing becomes more and more recreational, something that gives the writer pleasure in the act itself. She is not concerned with work accomplished by expressive writing, because she feels satisfaction in merely writing (July 19, 2010).

My point was that expressive writing was more inclusive and egalitarian than transactional writing and could be expected to get more people writing and feeling the benefit of writing.  I called this the horizontal axis of school reform: the axis that expands the field of writers without severely regulating what they write. I had traced this horizontal growth from the early 1970’s with the writing and research of Peter Elbow and James Britton.

The institution of the Common Core State Standards in Language Arts would be a more vertical trend in school reform, since words like “rigor”  and “high quality first draft text under a tight deadline” proliferate throughout the document.  Obviously the very notion of standards has a vertical momentum to it. Far be it from me to deny the vertical path to glory.

But my theme for 2011 will continue to be the “day of small things,” because I believe that ultimately better writers are motivated by more writers, and that writing can be fun as well as hard work.  The best analogy I can give is how water boils.

Water boils when all the molecules are in furious motion and not a moment before they reach 212 degrees Fahrenheit.  They start bumping each other and pretty soon they have the urge to evaporate. Then we get steam, a very productive form of the water molecule.   So productivity comes from individual and communal energy. The horizontal axis expands and the vertical axis rises to glory.

I am not claiming that the laws of physics pertain to literacy, but I am claiming that development of literacy is both horizontal and vertical. The small things we write about daily constitute the horizontal axis and should not be neglected.

Do not despise the “day of small things.” My New Year’s resolution and a word of encouragement for teachers of writing in 2011.