These days I spend an awful lot of time behind my computer monitor, reading. I realize that statement would have been pure science-fiction to my teenaged self, but I also realize that, although the technology has changed dramatically, the art of writing hasn’t. It’s still a central plank in the platform of our culture, and a certain amount of mastery is mandatory for fully-participating members.
I used to teach high school English, and for most of my career the abilities of my graduating students to read and write at an appropriate level were judged 60% by me and 40% by an examination they all wrote at the end of Grade 12. The essays they wrote on this examination were evaluated by a bank of professional educators, fellow teachers mostly, hired for several weeks during their summer vacations for the task.
So, although I was, and am, a firm believer in encouraging student writers to find their own language and organization, when I was preparing my students for the exam essays, I would conjure up this scenario: “Imagine a large, non-air-conditioned room full of English teachers, mostly men, in shorts and t-shirts spending the beginning of their holidays. They’re assembled to read piles of essays written by students like yourselves, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Your job is to make your essay stand out in this ocean of 5-paragraph sludge, to grab the attention of those readers. And to do that, you need a compelling introduction and thesis statement.”
I’m pretty confident that at least a few of them managed; certainly I nurtured more than my share of excellent student writers!
But that’s not the audience I’m writing for; you, readers of blogs and Facebook, are. So I expect you will indulge me if I give you some anecdotes, and let you draw your own conclusions...
I remember seeing Stephen Hume, editor of The Martlet at Uvic at the time, sitting behind his typewriter in the basement of the SUB, rapidly cranking out course essays on piles of half-sheet yellow paper. I was monstrously impressed. I was still handwriting my essays laboriously and, because I was a slow and inaccurate typist, I had to pay someone else to do the required typing. That required a readable copy based on my text, corrections, and annotations. A man of more determination and character, would, of course, have taken the bit in his teeth and learned to type properly; instead, I was bailed out (as is so often the case!) by my wife, an excellent typist, who solved the typing problem for the rest of my university time, my early years of teaching, and even my very brief stint as a newspaper columnist.
According to the standards of the time and my high school English teachers, I was a good writer, the kind you see represented in the “literary” section of your high school year books. I was certainly encouraged by approval and publication, but reading those pieces now, I see the efforts of a sort of junior Lord Black of Crossharbour, with pomp and circumstance substituting for actual style and content. By the time I became a teacher, I no longer wrote like that, and I certainly didn’t encourage my students to do so either: I taught them how to write for newspapers; and to write informal journals quickly, off the top, not worrying about style at all; and to write stories with a beginning, middle, and end, (not necessarily in that order); and to write essays – lots of essays – that would make their teacher want to read and understand what they had written.
Like most English teachers, I quickly got adept at decoding a lot of very bad handwriting. And regularly asked students to include a previous draft of their essay with the copy they wanted me to read, just so I could see if they had made an effort at polishing. At the time, requiring a rough copy was a thing, and most English teachers demanded one.
Good writing demands an audience to write for, so any good writing program requires a method of publication: and hasn’t the world shifted dramatically and rapidly in that regard?! My friend Mike and I had put together a couple of literary/arts magazines while students at Uvic (paid for by the AMS!) so I knew the basics of preparing copy for publication. However, schools don’t usually have those resources, so my first writers got their efforts posted on the wall, then we got a typewriter or two in the classroom and made gestetner copies from masters covered with red corrector fluid. Carihi purchased an offset printer and allowed me to use it so a school newspaper and magazine became possible. Then came photocopiers, then computers and an accessible internet...and the rest brings us up-to-date. By the time I retired I had writing classes in a computer lab where selected students and I used a layout program to produce online and printed writing magazines on demand. And most of my other students handed in only word-processed work.
The other thing that happened was that technology changed the writing process. Our family got its first computer (a Circle100, 64 MB of internal memory) in the mid-1980’s, and almost immediately discovered why this machine was going to change our writing forever. For example, I learned how to type, by doing it, looking at the keys and correcting en route. It instantly demolished the rough copy/good copy paradigm: I couldn’t very well ask my students to provide rough copies if I no longer produced them myself! It likewise demolished my former method, so carefully drilled into me by my high school teachers, of careful planning, writing continuously from an outline until concluded, and then rewriting, making revisions as needed. As the home computer became the only way we wrote at our house was it logical to demand an outline from students? Especially as, when I embarked on a piece of writing, I usually had only a sense of where I was going and how I was going to get there? Increasingly, there was a gap between what was required on the Government Exam (handwriting, consequently careful planning before starting) and what I knew about the writing process and the actual norm among my students.
I wrote a piece for the Globe and Mail on this very subject so I won’t revisit that argument now.(https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/johnny-cant-write---does-it-matter/article1093149/)
I notice that my call for a wired classroom turned into a Wi-Fi enabled classroom, and that, instead of permitting students to write their exams online, the Ministry of Education cancelled the exam. That’s a choice I applaud, though I suspect it was done for financial rather than educational reasons. In that respect, full circle back to when I started teaching, when the Ministry had, within the decade since I had graduated from high school, dumped Provincial final exams!
These days I have a daughter who teaches English, and am reminded of my father, who became an English teacher in Canada but retired before the advent of the computer age. He started by writing his recollections of growing up in Holland and coming to Canada in longhand, in his beautiful italic script, but when, aged about 80, we got him his first computer he took to the writing and email part like the proverbial duck to water. It gave him great joy to print out those recollections and pass them around to relatives and friends. He even allowed me to publish them on the web where they will live long after both of us are gone. (https://justhavelaar.wordpress.com/)
When he was a boy, the telephone hadn’t yet made its way into his family’s life. Who coulda thunk it?
Where are we going with this? There are people I know who “write” by speaking into their phones, and claim this is the way of the future. But don’t believe it: good thought requires good writing, and that requires good revision.
Even President Trump, in the rare times he really wants to make sense, reads what someone has written for him off the teleprompter!
