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English Composition for Dummies
Our own Professor Paul Rahe asked in an earlier post if it’s possible to teach college students to write. Well, yes, anybody with average cognitive skills can be taught the writer’s craft. The better question is to ask why English composition is no longer taught in our nation’s high schools.
The short answer is that educators have been trained over the last half century to deliver a completely amorphous curriculum known as language arts. Students of George Orwell will recognize this trend as part of the effort to reduce the English lexicon into meaningless drivel. The precision demanded by the discipline formerly known as English composition has been replaced by a lumpy gruel with no clear purpose or distinction. The average student will study feminist perspectives on advertising before she’s ever taught how to sew a noun to a verb to complete a coherent thought.
Fear not, my conservative brothers and sisters, because I’m on the job! I am even now in the process of grading about a hundred essays. The job won’t take long, insofar as most of these first attempts are completely unintelligible. I’m content at this point to know that my students can identify the business end of a pencil from the eraser.
I have, in my classroom, twenty copies of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, largely undamaged but for ten years of accumulated dust. We can start with this little treasure: “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.” One of the joys in reading E.B. White is how he illustrates even as he instructs. What a great little sentence.
When I teach, I tell students to think of their essays as they would a new house. The walls have been freshly painted, the floors scrubbed, and you’re ready to move in. Now, go ahead and take a pencil and diagram your basic plan. You must have some sort of structure before you move even one piece of furniture. Your heaviest furnishings — beds and sofas — represent your nouns. Place them next to the walls. It’s important that you select quality nouns built of good wood and durable fabrics. That foldout bed that you kept as a bachelor is known as a pronoun. You can set that out on the street now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Now we’re going to arrange our tables, chairs, dressers, and that all-important writing desk in the scriptorium. These secondary furnishings represent your verbs. As per E.B. White, English is written with nouns and verbs and proper placement is crucial for a pleasing result. Accurate nouns supported by vigorous verbs will give your prose its punch. Aim for pith and clarity: we can make minor adjustments later when we modify our syntax as part of the editing process. When you find yourself stuck with a beautiful word that just won’t fit, leave it in the garage next to grandma’s brass bed.
Okay, so far, so good. Now we’re ready to decorate. Adjectives are your wall hangings and knick-knacks. Use them sparingly or your room will become a cluttered mess. It’s okay to put a splash of color here and there with metaphors or alliteration, but we’re looking for an overall affect that is clean yet vigorous. Adverbs should be used most sparingly of all. My personal preference is to shoot them in the back of the head with a .25 caliber Makarov, but that’s just me. I can always argue the case later in court that a Makarov is not actually a firearm.
The final step in any good essay is a process known as editing. Here’s your chance to adjust your prose to make it aesthetically pleasing, yet potent. Eliminate unnecessary words. Adjust your syntax for clarity and precision. Pithy does not mean short, though vigorous prose tends to be concise. If you are like most writers, you will know your piece is finished when you get sick and tired of the process. Done.
Image Credit: Flickr user Jeffrey James Pacres.
Published in General
Wonderful.
Your poor students will realize that they have nothing to say. Which can be fixed. :)
Someday, there will be a “Like” button for posts. This one is worthy of the feature.
Perhaps you will ruin a promising career of writing legislation for one of your students.
It’s fun and rewarding for both teachers and many students work this intentionally on good basic style. I had the luxury of teaching a writing elective where we did just that. Sadly, the glut of new demands inserted by every education policy-maker with an axe to grind, from Arnie Duncan on down, has crowded that type of instruction out of the standard English class.
A tool as basic as “signal words” can do wonders for essays that border on the incoherent. When I’m grading a stack of essays for classes that are generally weak in writing, I notice that the pieces integrating the simple first, second, third distinguish themselves.
Also, it’s obvious when a student took even a slight interest in the topic, or maintained awareness of an audience. In those cases, despite flaws in the writing, the essay speaks. It’s alive.
Third, writing shouldn’t be as difficult as it is for today’s students. I believe they lack the building blocks–the knowledge, vocabulary, and intuitive ability with syntax–because they don’t read. Instead, they are drawn to electronic devices to the extent that they are impairing their potential.
Has there ever been any research connecting the practice of reading ALOUD, and the ability to write in a functional way?
I remember sitting at my desk in elementary school, reading the text book, out loud. In science, reading, social studies, etc. Everyone read out loud, right down the row, no one was skipped. Is that a common practice in schools today?
Julia, I hadn’t given thought to reading out loud vs. reading to self. Reading aloud is probably where it starts–students can’t read freely and widely to build knowledge until they have mastered decoding. And Daniel Willingham says that for many students, the decoding skill hasn’t been completely mastered until around eighth grade.
Having students take turns reading aloud is controversial. When I was attending my overall good ed. classes, the practice was discouraged as “round robin reading.” It is said to make students so self-conscious, they can’t concentrate on the content of the text.
I think the reality is more of a mixed bag. Students here in the Montana school where I sub seem to enjoy being called on to read. One must be careful not to overuse the practice–it can embarrass slower readers and tax advanced readers–but in general students don’t want their turn to read skipped.
This year, I was told that round-robin is a thing of the past. Now we do choral reading as a class. The teacher models and sets the pace. I don’t think that’s bad, necessarily, but I think it would be okay to mix it up once in a while with the reviled round-robin (which you can randomize with “popcorn” and other approaches that kids love). Now, individual turns to read aloud are encouraged in small groups, a practice backed up by the research these days.
Also, Julia, E.D. Hirsch says that schools have neglected science and social studies in their scramble to help students score well on their math and language arts high-stakes tests. Unfortunately, the neglect backfires because reading scores improve when kids accumulate knowledge in different domains.
I see the over-emphasis on language arts somewhat up here, but science and history have not been eclipsed entirely. Also, I see teachers choosing reading books that acquaint students with literature, mythology, and non-fiction topics. Bulls-eye.
Some additional observations :
1. Why aren’t parents teaching their kids to read before kindergarten and instilling the appreciation for great books? This is one of the best ways to teach a child how to spell and write. Granted, my mother was a teacher in her youth but my father wasn’t and he was such a grammarian, he’d get up and bring a dictionary to the dinner table if my brother or I used an incorrect tense during idle conversation. (He still does this.)
2. Emphasis upon reading and writing should begin in grade school and become more pronounced in middle school (I still can’t believe high school students are only now getting exposed to The Fountainhead, for example). I remember cleaning out the closets of my childhood room when my parents finally decided to move to FL and discovering a 10 page essay I’d written at age 15 on the causes of the Russian Revolution. Frankly, I could barely comprehend what I’d written decades ago and I attended a public school. :)
3. Last night while dining with my mom and dad, the first question was, as always “What are you reading lately?”
Julia, you’re a teacher yourself, aren’t you? Would you remind me what you teach?
The history version of this is known as social studies.
My mom always asks me that during our weekly phone conversations.
Darwin’s Blade by Dan Simmons, in case anyone is wondering.
Jason L. Riley’s Please Stop Helping Us.
I, the Jury. By Mickey Spillane. Heh.
I teach music. I do know that round robin reading is probably a thing of the past because of confidence issues. But I will stand by the concept that you get better at reading (or anything else) by doing it, not by avoiding it. just the same as you get better at playing an instrument or singing by doing it, not by avoiding it.
I have compassion on my music students who are fearful to perform for others, and I do create assignments where all can “produce” in the classroom for others without shame or embarrassment because their skills might not be advanced as another’s. It is a path to be tread lightly, but it must be tread.
I just think there is a spiral-like connection between speaking/pronouncing words that are seen, and hearing yourself read, that is overlooked. It is just a hunch.
I also think that hearing a parent or a sibling contributes to the ability to read, and that is skipped these days by too many. Another hunch.
and by the way, nothing makes my day or week more than a student who opts to decline to perform in class, comes in for extra help, then finds they CAN do it. Then they play for the class. There is nothing more joyful than seeing a student face their fears, and trounce them. I get verklempt whenever I think about the times this has happened.
[gotta love the broken ricochet letting me use a lot of words!]
I officially contribute the remainder of my 400 words to your post. :)
I kind of liked the limit, it forced you to go back and edit for clarity (and stupidity). but now it doesn’t even count. Ah, freedom.
Then there is this:
I did too. WFB would have approved so long as there wasn’t a limit of the length of individual words. :)
A two-hundred word limit works equally well.
Granted that my school was exceptional, being a college-prep school, but one of the best writing classes I took there was a précis writing course. It was a great lesson in boiling down gassy rhetoric to short coherent thoughts. It had the corollary lesson that if you could not reduce the core of an argument down to a few sentences then either you did not understand it, or else it was not understandable.
It helps that I don’t type very well.
Our best meals involve bringing in Brewer’s or Webster’s to settle an argument. It is even more fun when we can find errors in the sources. Brewer’s is *wonderful*, but deliciously imperfect.
This is critical. I find that people who cannot summarize their argument do not, in fact, understand it.
Nice to hear there exists a family as weird as mine. :)
As an aside, your comment reminded me of much of the dialogue in Potok’s beautifully written The Chosen.
I’m not sure whether it is twitter, texting, poor education or some combination but the level of discourse both verbal and written in my profession is disgraceful. Back when I first started as a programmer you could be sure that one of the requirements listed for any job was communication skills. Proper use, or at least near-proper use, of the language was a key skill required to be effective. Now, not only isn’t it a requirement but one can find themselves on the business end of a chat with HR for even raising the issue. The quality of documentation I see is appalling but worse is the inability of college educated people to make a point verbally. Common is the bloviator than can consume 15 minutes of a meeting without saying anything; brevity is scarce.
Like!, dear Mugwump…Excelsior!