I am currently teaching a writing course, and a day after explaining compound sentences, and minutes after preparing a lecture on eliminating wordiness, I picked up Philip Roth’s A Plot Against America and came across the following mammoth and dazzling sentence.
“Elizabeth, New Jersey, when my mother was being raised there in a flat over her father’s grocery store, was an industrial port a quarter the size of Newark, dominated by the Irish working class and their politicians and the tightly knit parish life that revolved around the town’s many churches, and though I never heard her complain of having been pointedly ill-treated in Elizabeth as a girl, it was not until she married and moved to Newark’s new Jewish neighborhood that she discovered the confidence that led her to become first a PTA “grade mother,” then a PTA vice president in charge of establishing a Kindergarten Mothers’ Club, and finally the PTA president, who, after attending a conference in Trenton on infantile paralysis, proposed an annual March of Dimes dance on January 30 – President Roosevelt’s birthday – that was accepted by most schools.”
While this sentence is not a-typical for Roth, it certainly is for the most of us. It’s important to note that it does not break any grammatical rules (it isn’t even a run-on), and that even my overly-sensitive grammar check didn’t have a problem with it.
I shared it with my students to illustrate that run-on doesn’t necessarily mean long, and to point to the fact that wordiness is not simply about the amount of words, but the meaning of the words: Roth has no redundancies here.
I read a review a couple of weeks ago in The New York Times of a book by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe called “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Home and Office”. It was also discussed in the Talk of the Town section of a recent New Yorker, and I heard one of the authors promoting it on Leonard Lopate one morning. I know a number of people in our communications community have been upset by the quality of emails they receive from students and others, and thought some readers of this blog might want to check out the book. It seems like it relays amusing stories we can all relate to, as well as helpful guidelines.
Earlier this summer I taught a class where I used in-class writing assignments extensively and was surprised by how effective it was as a pedagogical tool.
Each day I brought in a list of questions for students, although they were free to write about whatever they wanted as long as it somehow related to our readings. Most of their responses showed thoughful engagement with the texts and it was enormously helpful for me to read what they wrote. It provided immediate feedback on the kinds of things that they liked as well as on what they were not getting. I also had students bring in their own questions and asked them to talk about why they wanted to address that issue. In this way, the writing assignments helped shape class discusssion.
The questions I gave them were helpful in a number of ways. Writing them helped me prepare for class in general and it consistently reinforced to students the ways in which I wanted them to be reading and thinking. But I think the biggest success of the in-class writing was demonstrated at exam time where they had to write four essays. The class was very nervous and disgruntled about having to take an exam, but in the end most of them did extraordinarily well. I think this is because they had been writing off the top of their heads about the material on regular basis, which reinforced their knowledge and their thought.
So, I know that most people reading this blog are already well aware of the benefits of this type of assignment, and in a way I am preaching to the converted. However, I couldn’t resist sharing my success and encouraging educators to continue to integrate in-class writing into their pedagogy.
I have noticed that when students submit typed papers they often only place one space after their periods and before the first word of the next sentence. I have always used two, and as far as I know so has everyone else that I know. I don’t like reading papers where the sentences are smooshed together like that, because it is not what I am used to and at times I find it extremely irritating.
When I’ve mentioned this to students, they tend to act like they have never heard of such a thing. In some cases they say that they were taught specifically to only use one space. A student last week claimed that every teacher tells him something different about it. Are teachers really telling students to only use one space? Have style manuals changed since I learned to type?
A colleague recently introduced me to a little gem — a small out of print Strunk & White type book that has the advantages of being small and not being Strunk & White. (Not that there is anything wrong with S&W, of course). The Golden Book on Writing by David Lambuth is yet another writing handbook which appeals to the word geek in me. There is something concise and gentle about this book and I would recommend it to anyone fortunate enough to find a copy.
I do wonder about writing handbooks, however. Like I said, there is something in me that enjoys reading about writing and putting a sentence together. (There is also something in me that is never quite sure how to use a comma and am always up for a refresher course.) But do students like these books? Do they actually read them? The ones like Keys for Writers which are less “talky” and more like manuals seem like they might be kind of complicated for undergraduates. And S&W and Elbow seem to require students to actually take the time to read them. I wonder how helpful others have found these books. I also wonder if anyone else out there knows of any little gems I might enjoy.
Does anyone have experience with having students evaluate their own drafts of papers? I think it’s important to get students to start thinking of their own work in critical and evaluative terms, to see that is not just an authority saying, “you should do this; it would be better if you could make it like this.” etc.
Last semester I developed a form with the following fields:
This essay is about ____
It’s main argument is ___
It is based on the following readings ___
The main strengths of this essay are ____
Is the argument well developed? How so or how not? ___
Explain how this essay is logical. Explain how this essay could be more clear ___
How can this essay be improved? ____
The intention was to have students start thinking in this way BEFORE coming to see a writing consultant. However, none of the students who were given this form last semester came to see me. Does anyone have feedback on the usefulness or limitations of my handout?
In high school, students are actively and consciously taught new vocabulary through a variety of methods – quizzes being the most obvious. I remember receiving extra credit on my essays whenever I incorporated words we had recently learned. Of course, the situation changes in college – students are expected to expand their vocabulary on their own, with the exception of discipline-specific terminology.
I am a little concerned about this. Often when I am working with students on their essays, I find that they have more clarity when they explain things to me themselves in regular conversational English. In these cases I tell them that they should “simply” write what they said because it is so much clearer. Although this kind of clarity and vocabulary aren’t the same thing, couldn’t the upshot be that I am asking students to limit their experimentation with more challenging verbal styles?
How do we encourage students to become more sophisticated writers, rather than better basic writers? How do college students learn to become familiar and competent with SAT and GRE type words as well as with jargon? I am afraid that by striving for clarity with my students I may be sacrificing the learning that comes from awkwardly trying out a new phrase or “big” word.
I recently conducted an editing workshop where I doggedly tried to drive home the point that writing needs to be done in stages and that students should never hand in a first draft (unless a teacher specifically asks for it), etc. We were discussing ways of making sentences better and a student said that she didn’t like messing around with her writing after her first attempt. How you know if what you’re doing is “better”? How do you know you’re not making it worse?
I realized that a lot of what I try to impart to students is something that comes naturally to me. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking consciously about my own editing decisions. I chock up the beautiful and complex prose that you are now sampling to instinct. But where does it come from? How do I make value judgments about my own writing? I know “good writing” when I see, and yet I also know that’s not a good enough answer.
I told the class what I have always been told and what I also believe to be true: better writing and editing are developed over time through reading habits. I encouraged them to read as much as possible of all sorts of materials, from sports pages, and ad copy to novels. I also suggested that they read academic articles and text books out loud every once in a while.
Of course, better writing is not necessarily entirely elusive or subjective. I know that there are guidebooks about style that would probably benefit both me and my students. In fact, as I write this, I am aware that underneath a pile of papers is a book I have been meaning to read for a month: Stunning Sentences by Bruce Ross-Larson from the Effective Writing Series. Perhaps therein lies a “better” answer to this student’s question?
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