On Writing — A Message to My Students
For close to two decades I find myself fielding variations on the following perennial questions:
- What can I do to get an A on my essay?
- Why did you dock points on my essay?
- What can I do to get better at writing?
What I’m sharing with you isn’t new and has probably been expressed with more eloquence and pith by others, but it’s an important message that bears repeating, not only because it’s one we need to remind ourselves on occasion, not just while we’re in school and enrolled in some writing class, but any time we sit down to write.
You are all high achievers in a community full of competitive high achievers — almost all striving to reach stratospheric heights of academic and professional success. Many of you have probably never had to struggle much, or if you have, those struggles have probably been very short lived. For instance, maybe it’s been your experience that if you meet with your math teachers to go over returned assignments, said teacher will walk you through the errors in your problem-solving, and come the next test, you show instant improvement. You perhaps believe that this can be replicated in English, so maybe you come to see me after an assignment is returned so I can go over the feedback in more detail with you, under the impression that this writing conference will instantly result in a better paper the next time around — even though writing papers isn’t like solving math problems at all. The next time around is a completely new writing situation with a different text and ostensibly different questions to answer/explore.
Many of you are looking for quick fixes and band-aid solutions to some of your writing woes, but if I may, let me bring a little bit of blunt truth and tough love to all of you. It will sound harsh, but I promise that it comes from a good place. I think we’ve done you a disservice as a society by telling you either explicitly or implicitly that you can be the best at anything you put your mind to if you just put in enough time and effort.
Some of you already realize this, but that’s pure bovine residue. There is just no possible way for me to become one of the best hitters in Major League Baseball (pardon the sports analogy) even if I decided to quit my job tomorrow and start practicing 10 hours a day, every day, for the rest of my life. As much as I may passionately *want* to be the best hitter in MLB, I will probably fall short in spite of how much effort and time I put into practice.
But should that be a reason to stop? Should that unattainable goal discourage me from continuing to play or hit when I can? Absolutely not. I may not be able to become the best in the majors, but I can still become the best possible hitter I can be.
This principle applies to writing as well as to baseball, and being the best possible writer you can be is contingent on what you have brought to bear over the past 10 years of your life to classes like this. So let me make a few points about writing:
#1… Writing is sort of like building a house or making a painting. It’s an act of creation — which is both a technical and artistic skill. When you create, you don’t start with perfection, you don’t start at 100 out of 100 points; you start at zero. How solidly and how beautifully you construct that essay determines your grade. After all, architectural awards are not given to buildings with cracks in the foundation and missing windows. And just because you built a nice building the last time around doesn’t mean this next building will turn out to be one people will want to buy.
#2… Writing is extremely difficult and the teaching of writing can even be more difficult. Think about it: writing is ostensibly the act of transferring all the ideas in your head into not just one other person’s head but the heads of multiple people — an audience — so that regardless of who is reading your stuff, no understanding is lost in that transfer. It’s what Stephen King has described as telepathy on the page, probably as close to a supernatural power as one might acquire in this life or the next. But this raises a question: how does one teach another human being to be better at telepathy, i.e, writing with clarity and artistry? At best, the most I and other English teachers can teach you is mastery. Mastery is organization. Mastery is coherence. Mastery is clarity. Mastery is clean and generally flawless language. Mastery will get your papers into the B-range — which is in my mind, already solid and already makes you a “good” writer.
But many of you want more than mastery. You want that A.
Other people may disagree, but to me, A papers are A papers because they go beyond mastery — because they show originality, depth, insight, an intuitive grasp of language, a turn-of-phrase that will electrify the hairs on the nape of a reader’s neck and make those hairs stand on end. This brings us to more questions: how does one teach originality, depth, insight, and intuitive style? Is it even possible?
I can show you — through samples and rubrics — what an organized and coherent paragraph or essay looks like, very much like a hitting coach will show film and video of strong batters to a struggling hitter. I can show you what makes a sentence clear vs. unclear, and I can show you how to construct grammatical parallel sentences, but I can’t teach you what to put in those paragraphs, when and how often to vary your sentence structures, when you should use parallelism, what metaphors or similes to use and when to use them, or what words to use to express your ideas. All of that (creative) stuff still needs to come from you. An English teacher is nothing more than a coach…
…which leads me to…
#3… What comes from you, then, is the breadth and scope of your experience with reading and writing. Some of you came into my classroom in August already at the level of proficiency and mastery. Many of you came to me below that but even such a short period of time, find yourselves approaching proficiency and mastery — which is no small thing to disregard as the school year isn’t even over. But here is another blunt truth: I bet that if I were to ask all of you to fill out a survey of your reading and writing habits, I guarantee you that every single student who has consistently earned an A on their writing assignments this year or any year are students who have read and continue to read for fun in their personal non-academic lives, perhaps even written for fun as well — because there is a direct correlation between good writers and avid readers.
It’s just logical, common sense if you think about it — the more you have read, the more words you’ve absorbed (so the better your vocabulary tends to be), the more exposure you’ve had to different sentences, different styles, different voices. And almost by intellectual osmosis, you internalize all the breadth and depth of that reading experience and are then able to transfer it into your own work.
Then, when you get to my class and I teach you what parallelism is, you suddenly have a label for all those sentences you unconsciously noticed and have been mimicking in your own writing for some time now. It was as if you came to me with 64 colors in your crayon box and when I asked you to paint me a picture, you had a lot of colors and techniques already at your disposal and thus produced stunning works of intellectual heft and art.
On the flip side, if you’re not a reader or writer, if the only time you’ve engaged in reading and writing is in my class or in your other English classes, chances are, you only got the box with 16 colors, and the illustration I asked you to create was a little less detailed, a little less nuanced, a little less vivid. That’s not necessarily a criticism so much as a description of the reality.
Does that mean you won’t get better? Not at all, but given your history with reading and writing, you need to have clear eyes about what is possible and attainable in a single year. That being said, I can say without hesitation that with effort, you will continue to get better — especially if you continue to strive for improvement, continue to read more, continue to write more, and if you perhaps pay a little less attention to the grades. There is no quick fix. One generally does not become a B or an A writer over the course of a single school year. Writing itself is an ongoing process and significant improvement doesn’t happen overnight. (I still go back to tweak assignments I had written back in college, believe it or not.)
It will likely take years, but that shouldn’t be a reason for discouragement. Rather, it should be a challenge that you should readily accept because here is another hard truth: no matter what you end up doing professionally, be it an engineer or doctor or attorney or software developer, people in such positions are not promoted and are not noticed because of their specific skill set. They are promoted and recognized because of their skill set AND their ability to articulate their thoughts so clearly in writing that they might as well have the power of telepathy. In the long run, the struggle and effort will be worthwhile.
After all, how amazingly cool would it be to be able to put something down on the page be so devastatingly powerful that it electrifies the hairs on someone else’s neck?
