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The Scandal About Why Janey And Johnny Can't Write
Janey and Johnny can't write well enough to do college work for two reasons: 1. Colleges and universities don't train writing instructors well, especially those in high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools. 2. No one has discovered a main principle that organizes all the many rules of writing. #1. Who says that 'higher education' doesn't train writing instructors well? One big voice is a December 8, 1975, Newsweek article titled, "Why Johnny Can't Write," as well as tens of thousands of articles by the same name on the Internet and elsewhere, ever since. And what nobody seems to remember is that there was also a 1963 study called Project English that said the same thing. This very thorough study was conducted by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. #2. Now, who says there's no main principle that organizes all the many rules of writing? I'll give you three important examples, though many more exist. The first example you might think is too out of date. Okay, sure, I admit the date is somewhat old. But the date doesn't mean it isn't good sense. After all, experts in Philosophy still quote Socrates and Aristotle from over two thousand years ago, don't they? I think you'll agree with it once you've read this statement by Herbert Spencer from his essay, "The Philosophy of Style," published in 1852 (Spencer's language is much too academic and dense, so let me translate): The important principles for writing and rhetoric are not organized. But they should be organized under a single principle that unifies them all into a whole that can be clearly understood. If they were, then all the principles of writing and rhetoric would be far easier to learn and to use. The second example is Professor Wayne C. Booth, a widely recognized authority on rhetoric and writing from the University of Chicago. In 1967, Booth complained about the lack of a main principle in rhetoric and writing: "Where is the theory, where are the practical rules . . .? . . . . no help in deciding what arguments might appeal to you, sitting out there in all your particularity on a particular occasion." Booth was complaining about there being no theory in Rhetoric that would account for modern scenarios: In other words, while Rhetoric may talk about "persuasion" as being the all-important principle (without supplying a process for implementing it, by the way), that's not good enough for modern man since there are many needs that go beyond the idea of persuasion. The third example to give us evidence of no main principle in writing also comes from the ranks of professional educators. In 1994, Robert J. Connors, a writing teacher and scholar at a prestigious university (St. Martin's), published his essay or article, "Crisis and Panacea in Composition Studies: A History." In it, Connors points out that the history of teaching writing in America has been a traceable series of crisis and temporary panaceas. In other words, someone or some organization hollers "Crisis!" and someone or some group comes up with a temporary solution that gets attention and funding for 10-25 years, with no permanent results. And then, wouldn't you know it, the cycle starts all over again with the next outcry of "Crisis!" Beginning in the 1840s, America has cycled through crises and panaceas involving literacy, textbooks and handbooks, teaching conditions, social aims and duties, life skills and learning processes, communications, semantics and abstraction ladders, structural linguistics, rhetoric, back to basics, generative grammars, process writing, research writing, cognitive psychology and logic, and discourse communities. What's going on now in teaching writing seems to be selectively dipping in and out of all those crises and panaceas. So what's the missing main principle? Here it is: What's new to the reader If your writing isn't new to the reader, then it just doesn't matter, right? But we must realize that "what's new" has meaning only when paired with "what's old." And that's helpful only when we realize that we can do only five things to what's old in order to make it into something new: Reverse Add Subtract Subtract Rearrange Those are the 5 NewView Options. And they aren't taught in textbooks or classrooms. But they're at work all the time in published essays, editorials, short stories, novels, poetry, and everything else written and published. Take published stories, for instance, whether short or long. If you look for it, you can see that in every one of them there's a strong OldView value stated early on in the story either by or about the main character and that by the end that OldView is REVERSED to a NewView. Every time. Check it out. (Contact me if you need help.) With published essays, the OldView is stated fairly quickly and the NewView Reverse soon follows it. Then the detailed support for the NewView is provided, and the conclusion looks to the future, usually. Why is this simple concept of five kinds of newness not taught in schools? I have an idea, but it doesn't matter. What does matter is that it should be. Ever heard of the National Council on Writing? Well, they officially hollered "Writing Crisis!" in a press release on April 25, 2003. What did they propose to do about it? Throw more money and people at the problem, doing the same things as in the past, but with more people, more equipment, more money. As they say on Sesame Street, What's wrong with this picture? In 2007, the National Education Association released statistics for the 2005 tests that showed four out of five high school seniors still can't write on the Proficient level (same results as in 1998 and 2002), which means they aren't able to do college writing. So, are we going to keep going through the "crisis and panacea" cycle?or try a NewView solution? Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com Next you'll want to learn more about Bill Drew's popular book, The Secret DNA of Writing Essays-And Everything Else. To see his other books on writing, go to his website. Bill has been a technical writer, an editor, a technical support director, and a freelance programmer, and he has taught writing at a university and junior colleges. Bill's NewView methods are being taught in elementar |
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