On December 8, 1975, news week The magazine ran a cover story titled “Why Johnny Can’t Write.” He raised national concerns about the quality of writing students produce in America’s K-12 schools. And it sparked an avalanche of thousands of protest articles with the same title over 30 years.
Also, in 1998, 2002, and 2007, national tests continued to show that those interested were still warranted, tests that were reported by the National Education Association: Only one in five seniors showed they could write well enough. like to do the required writing in colleague. And in 2003, the National Writing Commission declared that there was a national crisis in the teaching of writing in the United States and basically recommended that all levels of schools and governments put in much more money, time, and people to deal with it. to the crisis.
However, what the authorities have not yet realized is that most of the major problems with the teaching of writing stem from teachers focusing their students’ writing merely on the FORMS of writing, without teaching the CONTENT. of the writing.
For example, teachers emphasize correct grammar, punctuation, and organization, which are all forms. And when they teach how to write essays, they spend all their time on introductions and conclusions, thesis statements, topic sentences and paragraphs, plus forms. All of these forms of writing are necessary, to be sure, but nowhere is there a connection between any of them and the most crucial thing about writing: CONTENT that is new to the reader.
It’s true that most teachers and textbooks DO tell students to avoid clichés, say something interesting, say something original or new, but they don’t give students a real process to think of something new. .
Do not misunderstand. I don’t blame writing teachers: I’m just describing the situation.
Actually, it is a cultural problem, that is, a cultural conceptual problem.
You see, no one really knows how to talk about the concept of novelty, so how can teachers be expected to instruct novelty in writing? In fact, our civilization has ignored coping with the concept of novelty for thousands of years.
Because? Because for all of us, the novelty has been this HUGE, mysterious, shapeless black box in our minds that we put everything we…
- I have not experienced yet
- have not yet been informed, and
- I haven’t thought yet
Let’s check this out, right here. As a thought experiment, try this: Can you think of ONE useful category that fits ALL types of news? (Of course, I mean other than the three groups in the previous paragraph. Let’s also add the idea of current events, making four. We usually think of something that happened recently as something new, like a new headache or a new What makes them new is just that they occurred close in time, or recently.)
So right now, try to find at least one category of novelty, and then continue reading after the line of asterisks, below.
*************** I couldn’t do it either, until I realized a couple more things.
First, like the vague concept of what is new, the concept of what is old has been a HUGE mysterious, shapeless black box in our minds that houses…
- all that we have lived,
- all that we have been told, and
- everything we have thought
–in fact, everything in our lives so far! Even with these three categories, the old is so huge that we can’t really understand it, right?
Second, I found that we can cope with new and old if we realize this fundamental relationship between the two: the new always depends on the old.
For example, you know the old saying, “You can’t talk about color with a blind man (who was blind from birth).” If your reader has no experience with the kind of thing he is talking about, that is, no experience with a shared group to which the thing belongs, something like it, like movies or computers, then he can’t talk. with him about it. You can’t really explain anything unless you use words and ideas from groups of things you already share with him.
So if your reader is Tarzan of the jungle (Tarzan taught himself to read, in the original story) and you use the word soap in your writing without explaining it, then Tarzan won’t know what you mean, since soap is something that has . never experienced, never said and never thought of. And you can’t describe a beautiful sunset to a blind man because he has never seen that group of things we call colors.
Now, that’s not too big of a mental leap, is it? To say that the new depends on what is already old (or already known) to the reader?
Alright. So what we need now are some categories that we can use to divide the concepts of new and old so that we can make a working relationship between the two.
Here’s a list of what I call old views:
- Values
- Expectations
- Experiences
- Reasoning
- language
And here is a list of what I call new views:
- Counter
- Add
- Subtract
- Substitute
- Reorganize
With these two sets of categories, we can teach students to identify what they share with their readers: the old view, and then we can show them how to process those five new views, making them new.
For example, a student might identify their own old-view strong value of not liking the divorce their parents went through, and also point out that their friends don’t like divorces either, in general.
So we can suggest that you use the reverse process of new view to say that divorce has some advantages, some good things about it. And by itself, you can most likely find examples showing that he actually spends more personal time with her father each week, going to a show or having dinner with him more often, as well as the wonderful fact that now she buys. more expensive personal gifts than before the divorce. Then we can help you put that into a thesis statement, make it resonate in topic sentences, use it to provide examples and stories in the body paragraphs, and create a nice introduction and conclusion.
We can teach Johnny, and Janey, to write new content and continue to use forms to do so. But only if we stop focusing so exclusively on shapes and start focusing first on what’s new to the reader. And only then should we show them how they can use traditional ways to support and convey that novelty.
As we all know, in the real world the novelty of the content generates forms, not the other way around.
By universally teaching “what’s new to the reader” as the most important factor in writing courses, we’ll never have to see another irritating “Why Johnny Can’t Write” article, and we’ll save a mountain of money. in the process.