'Getting the Words Right': How to teach-and not teach-writing

National Review, Sept 11, 2000 by Tracy Lee Simmons

Once upon a seminar in the mid 1980s, a cadre of graduate teaching assistants gathered to hear a talk delivered by the author of a textbook designed for courses in freshman English. "This is an exciting time to teach writing," she intoned, "because it's not just about writing anymore." She extended her arms from a billowing smock of clashing colors and balanced an invisible balloon upon her head. "Writing is about self-realization. You have the power to help your students discover their own uniqueness." Mere writing, stringing words together with concision and clarity, suddenly seemed pedestrian. What those TA's could not figure out, though, was how her textbook, damp with its New Age mist of self-discovery, could help to teach anyone how to write anything one might generously call English.

She didn't ride the fringes. She spoke for the New Way. For over the previous 20 years the academic instruction of writing in America had been transformed from an apprenticeship in careful utterance-burdened with grammar and rules of usage and endless red-pencil-marked themes-to a smooth path to an easy grade. Everybody can do it. Just open the dikes of the repressed psyche and watch the creative tide flow to the broad, calm waters of mental and emotional health. Our New Age author was right: It isn't just about writing anymore.

Would that it were. Writing well has been a thorny task at all times; the best practitioners of the craft have always borne witness that good writing doesn't come naturally. It's a sweaty, punishing business. And it is a job made no easier by larding on greasy desiderata for self-fulfillment and, a not-always-stated purpose, political awareness. How did anyone fob off the idea, sometime between the Beatles' first LP and disco, that writing one's language simply and accurately isn't enough for one course?

We can see the damage wrought upon us all by "empowerment" learning-namely, not so much that words fail us, but that we fail words, the mindful use of which once supplied a fairly reliable key to one's intelligence and culture. Everywhere, even in formal situations where precise language has been customarily expected, we hear speakers fumbling for the tolerably approximate word. We were taught to express ourselves, after all, not to agonize over bourgeois notions of communication. Little do we realize that expression without communication not only fails to express accurately, it also sports a lack of consideration for the listener or reader, whose job is now to guess what is meant. Refusing to take pains with words is bad manners. If careless language isn't exactly uncivilized, it's certainly uncivilizing, for carelessness is contagious.

Our predicament may be even more dire than it appears. Historian Paul Johnson speculated recently that, despite the wizardry of computers and the Human Genome Project, the dollop of intelligence meted out to each one of us may be shrinking. It would be ironic if the Information Age ushered in a new disenfranchising ignorance.

Fortunately, teachers of writing needn't bother themselves over such doom-spotting. In fact, they oughtn't. We've had philosophers and psychologists aplenty holding forth in the writing academy. What we need now are folks who can teach the craft of prose, which is a much simpler matter than the theorists would have us believe. Learning to write well involves learning rules and usages; it entails heavy reading in models of clarity and grandeur; it requires practice. An interviewer once asked Hemingway what exactly he was doing during his long, sticky hours of revision. "Getting the words right," he replied. That's the word from a pro: Writing is about making sure both that you know what the words signify and that they work together to say what you mean. It's about getting your words right.

Hard work makes superior writing achievable; tenacity counts for more than talent. The good news is that people exist who can do the teaching required to bring it about. The bad news is that they're rarely to be found teaching writing courses in schools, colleges, and universities.

Aside from attacking the endemic causes of bad writing and expression in the vital years of childhood-loss of rich reading habits, abdication of schools from teaching the proper use of language, unwillingness of parents to correct their children's verbal gaffes, TV-there remain a few things we can do to improve the quality of our writing. We must begin the trek with stout doses of clear thinking.

Good writing can be taught only prescriptively: It begins with rights and wrongs. It feeds on precept. This is obvious enough in the realm of grammar: Martin Luther King Jr. didn't say "I has a dream" for a reason. Then there's that vast sea called "usage," fraught with principles and precedents galore, needing delicate navigation and a deft finger on the tiller. (May we split infinitives? May we end sentences with prepositions?)

Communication should be the watchword. The object isn't merely to get your thought out, but to get it out where it can be understood: in the minds of other people. Grammar and usage together, not self-expression, should be the lodestar for the writing course.