RSSEnglish teachers embrace 21st century composition skills
By Angela Gunn | Published March 2, 2009, 10:19 PM
The National Council of Teachers of English isn't merely acquiescing to texting, blogging, video journalism, and all that newfangled tech stuff. In a fiery policy paper on "Writing in the 21st Century," past NCTE president Kathleen Blake Yancey makes a positive case for teachers to rethink how they teach "composing" skills in the classroom.
Composing, in other words, means effective communication by any means available -- not only pen and paper. The paper (PDF available here) gives the example of a 16-year-old girl who combined e-mail and photos to alert authorities and the media to an imminent disaster in her hometown. Texting, video, e-mail, and blogging all have authorship, and all deserve to be considered, states the paper, as the culture moves away from more traditional ideas of who writes and why.
Composing differs from more traditional ideas of writing in several ways. It doesn't produce discrete drafts; instead, composers will usually refine their work within the same draft, then hit publish when it's finished. (Exhibit A: This article. I'm writing on a screen in Betanews' publishing system and will tweak the copy a couple of times before posting it to the site, but there'll be no separate draft existing somewhere in the world. Exhibit B: Your Facebook page. Exhibit C: Most of the blogosphere.) In addition, we learn to compose from each other, not from a teacher-student relationship; no one has to go to class or apprentice under an experienced user become a Twitter user, much less to get a credential certifying that one's qualified to Twitter.
(The "peer co-apprenticeship" model, by the way, is precisely the thing that gives some traditional members of the press fits and causes them to talk about the prospect of "licensing" journalists. It's too early to know whether the NCTE's thinking will cause that sort of bloviation to spread to other corners of the profession, but the phrase "pushing the river uphill" comes to mind.)
And, the paper states, to compose well, you've got to have research and discernment skills far, far above those we used to deploy when reading and writing. The Internet, as the paper says, "presents a unique challenge to scholarship," both in good ways (useful search engines) and bad (the difficulty of verifying the source and slant of information one finds).
That may be the most challenging aspect of the composing revolution, which has been on the march since the rise of the personal computer and word-processing technology. The Yancey report is asking not that the teachers scrap their pens and notepads, but that they acknowledge that the tools young writers need have changed.
"The issue now," says the paper, "is distinguishing between rich resources and the online collection of surface facts, misinformation, and the inexcusable lies that masquerade as the truth. It will be hard for our students to be thoughtful citizens without this ability to discern the useful from the irrelevant."
In other words, a little less fretting about lolspeak such as "srsly" or the shortcuts texters use, please, and more help for young composers to develop lifelong skills in effective communication and information sifting. Purists may sigh at the memory of writing classes of yore, but if the change results in smarter, clearer-thinking Net citizens, who would say it nay?
Anyone who's done a google search and been bombarded with far too much information understands Yancey's point that the prime literacy issue today is how to quickly and accurately separate worthwhile online sources from everything else.
The problem is, the very skills needed to be discerning are the ones needed to write and think in words on paper. If truncated text-speak looks right to us - along with the shorthand thought that's behind it -how will we recognize the value of more complex writing needed to express complex ideas?
The answer is we won't be detect substance from, well, all those online inexcusable lies. For proof, look no further than your students' last batch of essays.
(END)
Score: 0
|If the composition skills of local newspapers, television newscasts, and what we read every day on the Net, I think it best for the NCTE to look back instead of ahead. What has been lost already in the way of skills is enough to make most reading unbearable, and impossible to follow. Methods of writing may vary with time, but the basics make all the difference in quality, clarity, and formation of thought. Some of today’s writings are simply impossible to thread together within your mind as to what the person was even trying to convey. Spell checking is another issue, when people use their, there and they’re in error, though a grammar checker may, or may not find the error.
Score: 3
|Hey, who can argue that PowerPoint didn't make presentations more literate, compelling,intelligent and insightful?
You feel smart just figuring out how to load it.
LOL!
Score: -1
|But you're making a distinction between writing skills and critical thinking skills. I'm not so sure there's that big of a difference in most people. Better writing skills usually lead to better critical thinking skills, and vice-versa. Generating thoughts worthy of print exercises critical thinking, and expressing those thoughts precisely exercises our writing and language skills.
Score: 2
|"Purists may sigh at the memory of writing classes of yore, but if the change results in smarter, clearer-thinking Net citizens, who would say it nay?"
"smarter, clearer-thinking Net citizens" huh?
LMAO.
Score: 0
|No kidding. So the total degradation of grammar and spelling is no big deal, just so long as you can get your ideas across. By that logic screaming obscenities and lobbing a Molotov c***tail makes for an effective composition.
Score: 1
|Disagree, psycros -- critical-thinking skills are even more sadly lacking online than writing skills, and that it's the lack of the ability to evaluate information and formulate coherent arguments that most often leads to bomb-throwing and similiar acts of inarticulation.
Most writers will tell you that writing and (especially) reading are the activities that most improve one's writing, *not* instructor-led classroom time per se. Critical-thinking skills, OTOH, have to be shaped by people who have already developed them. Given the limited amount of time available in the school day, it's important to prioritize, and I agree with these priorities. And I say this, BTW, as someone who as a kid won one of NCTE's national awards; even I comprehend that the caravan has, if not moved on, rolled into new terrain. Yes, writing shapes the brain, shapes the faculties of reason, but it's not the only way to make that happen.
(Or, putting it another way, I have yet to personally killfile any commenter simply because he or she doesn't write well. I have, however, killfiled at least one commenter who writes perfectly acceptable, but turgid and ill-conceived, commentary.)
Score: -1
|Sorta like we do when confronted with fluff better suited for TMZ.
Proof that fancy formatting tools and a computer are not sufficient in and of themselves to communicate material of substance.
Score: 1
|