On Being a Writer

I was looking at a couple of reader responses posted in an online forum today -- we, as a school use online sites to allow students to post material and interact with the teacher and each other in a way both complementary and supplementary to the classroom experience. Neat stuff.

One student wrote a by-the-numbers response with a topic sentence, some supporting facts and a conclusion. The content was serviceable and the argument, sound if uninteresting. Another student began with a hook sentence: seemingly unrelated, grammatically jarring and on the whole, disarming. She then moved from this unexpected statement into a subtle and interesting discussion of a topic which, it just so happens, turns out to be tangentially related to the assigned topic. By the end, she wrapped up an elegant statement and a complex but orderly paragraph which informed and entertained.

These are high school freshmen. Ninth graders. Fourteen year olds. No one taught the second student how to write; she naturally saw this mode as the best way to engage with and speak to her audience. It seems that those people who find writing "easy" do so because they naturally already have something they want to say. They explore and turn ideas over and the ideas bubble out into words. Give them a concrete question, and you'll get a long and intricate response. Give them an open ended essay and you'll either get brilliance or a free-flowing fountain of everything and nothing.

It seems that good and natural writing cannot be taught, only refined. And those people who don't naturally write can't be taught the skill -- it either develops out of reading and a maturation of thought, or it has to be replaced by the workmanlike and competent writing which is the end product of direct instruction. We cannot teach inspiration and passion, just a satisfactory replacement.