mediators

Erin O’Connor, from a post that I’ve been thinking about for the past six months or so:

English teachers are mediators. They are not ends in themselves. That’s how it should be, anyway. They are training wheels that young readers ought to be able to shed once they acquire the skills they need to read purposefully and profitably on their own. But, too often, this backfires. Kids get turned off, and reading just becomes a chore they have to do for school. Or — and this pattern is less discussed, but still troubling — they become dependent. They may really enjoy reading — but they think they need a class, and spoonfed lectures, and guided discussions, in order to get anything out of what they read. They are willing and eager — but have learned from their teachers exactly what they should not have learned. They have become passive where they should be active, and the teacher becomes a crutch for laziness, fear, uncertainty, and sometimes even a creeping snobbery about reading, about choosing what to read, deciding how to read, and figuring out what one thinks about what one has read. These folks grow up into the kind of adults who answer questions about their favorite books by listing works they think should be their favorites — but that they may never have even actually read.

learning writing

Very interesting article by Rachel Toor in the Chronicle of Higher Education on trying to get people to understand the value of writing well. She focuses particularly on friends of hers who are scientists and who, though they have to write a good deal, can't be bothered to learn how to do it skillfully.

There's something crucial here that often gets lost in academic writing (it's worse in fields like literary criticism and history). Because the work is so important to academics, sometimes they don't do a good job of convincing readers that they, too, should find it valuable. In many cases, the writer doesn't do a good enough job of explaining what the idea is, and then making the best argument for it.

When Godfrey [a friend of Toor’s an academic physician] told me that he'd had a manuscript rejected because the reviewers didn't get the importance of his findings, I explained that the failing was most likely his, not theirs. It's the burden of the writer to be clear and to let readers know why they should care. . . .

If you want a journal to accept your paper, or a federal agency to grant you coin, you have to make clear what is at stake and why the reader should care. Then you have to put forward the strongest reasoning based on evidence you provide in the clearest language you are able to rally. And then you need to know when you need help.

Erin O’Connor adds a comment:

A secret I learned during my year teaching high school students at a small Massachusetts boarding school: They like grammar (and vocabulary and syntax and usage) lessons, and want them, and want to write better. A secret I learned when I returned to Penn from that job: Same is true of college students. I had always done massive grammar and syntax commenting on student papers along with more global commenting on structure and framing and even more global commenting on the content of the argument itself, but after that year in high school I started devoting some formal class time to it as part of the writing component of the lit courses I taught. That was an unusual thing to do in a literature course, and I worried at first that the students would find the whole thing beneath them (even though they needed the work). But they didn't. And they improved. And it was good.

Again and again in my career I have seen that people who can write well — in almost any field — give themselves a great advantage over their competition. I have former students in the business world, English majors all, who have kept their jobs or even gotten promotions when people with business and economics degrees were being laid off: their ability to communicate, especially in writing, was always the key. What Toor and O’Connor show is that there are basic writing skills that almost anyone can learn and employ, skills that will save them a lot of time and effort later — if they are willing to take some time and effort now. But of course, it helps if they can find someone to teach them. . . .