Don't Kill High School English (Part II)

In “Death to High School English,” a 2011 salon.com article, Kim Brooks, bemoans the lack of writing preparedness by students coming to college, and blames, in part, the tendency to focus on literature, especially classics, which, she says “might be a profound waste of time for the average high school student.”   She argues this because she sees literature as separate from “learning to support an argument or use a comma,” essentially, her definition, along with an effective thesis statement, of effective academic writing.  In a previous post, I discussed some factors that affect writing success in highschool, ending with one advocating reading.  Here, I want to argue for the value of high school students reading broadly, including the classics, in order to write effectively.

In my experience, the greatest deficit student writers have upon entering college is an inability to read mindfully—and I am writing this as a composition specialist.   

The fact is that precision with grammar and even argumentation isn’t enough if the writer isn’t a sound and engaged thinker.  Writing accurately isn’t sufficient; college writers have to write about something of substance.  That’s where the ideas that they read come in to their writing. Moreover, they have to compose within the rhetorical constraints of the language, rhetoric they can learn by reading it.  And beyond those basics, they need to develop style.  This entails learning nuances of written communication so as to develop appropriate stances for their various writing situations.  It takes practice, for example, to recognize as a reader when a writer is being sarcastic.  Then, it requires good judgment as a writer to determine whether to apply those strategies in one’s own prose.

Reading at the college level is reading what, to be sure, but also it is reading what is not there.  Some refer to this as reading with and against the grain.  (Peter Elbow’s believing and doubting game is a version of this concept.)  Students can be taught this adult reading strategy in high school as they discuss reading, whether classics or comics.  The key point is to support contentions by using the text rather than merely a personal impression. 

But reading for a college-level composition course requires more:  more than what and what not, it also requires how (the writer writes).  I discovered early on that my students had never thought that they could learn about writing by reading, but they learned differently by asking questions about the writers’ craft:

• What is this person doing that works for me?

• What, if anything, is problematic about this writer’s writing?

• What else might the writer do with the writing?

With these sorts of reader-response questions, students realized that they could learn from others how to make stylistic choices about their own writing.  After we did that a few times, I noticed that students started referring back to what they read, not for what the person wrote but for the way he or she wrote it.  I would hear something like this:  “I tried to work with my idea like X did in this paragraph because I liked the way she asked a question and then answered it.”  Some people will say that this just ties students to models rather than encouraging them to develop their own voice.  To the contrary, I think of this awareness of others' strategies as tools that students can use to develop their own writing prowess. 

Speaking of tools, one of the most efficient ones is tied to reading classics:  allusions.  Think of an allusion as a shorthand for people sharing a conversation.  Those who know the back story of an allusion will share a full understanding of what a writer is conveying.  Conversely, a writer who has reason to believe that his or her readers know the back story, has the luxury of using an allusion rather than laying out the details that gives the term a full meaning.  A few examples: 

• The recent NSA disclosures prompted references to 1984.  To understand those references fully, a person needs to at least be aware of the plotline of Orwell’s book, not the year. (The reference to NSA, by the way, is also an allusion, this one depending on knowledge of current politics.)

• Romeo and Juliet laws have a meaning of their own, but to understand why that is the widely used term for such regulations, a person needs to be familiar with the Shakespearean play.

• A person who doesn’t want to do things might be referred to as a Bartleby, after Melville’s character.

• I’ve used the phrase, “this is a Tom Sawyer moment” to indicate a time when others are tricked into doing what I want them to do (after the painting episode in Tom Sawyer).

• A generally derogatory reference for a Black person who is regarded by other Blacks as acting too White is Uncle Tom, after the Harriet Beecher Stowe character.

• We talk of a catch-22 when a person is trapped by contradictory rules.  The term has full meaning only when a person is familiar with Joseph Heller’s book.

• A brave new world isn’t usually brave, unfortunately.  To understand that, people need to know Aldous Huxley’s dystopia.

If we don’t share this lively, vivid shorthand, think of the meanings lost, or the turgid prose required to retrieve them. 

Ultimately, communication is a social activity, shared experiences, including ones created by individuals reading—for plot, for characterization, for truths, or for values—texts that become part of their future contexts as they continue to communicate with others.  Broad and deep reading is as essential to good writing, I believe, as any perfectly placed comma.