Latin School of Chicago

first person David Marshall Middle and Upper School English Teacher Embracing thE ProcEss As a writing teacher, I love a mess. I love studying a student's edits – the crossouts and carets in three colors ink, the revisions of revisions, the s-shaped arrows to sentences stretched vertically along the margin, the questions scrawled desperately in whatever space remains. While many of my students look for clouds to part and heavenly light to hit them squarely on the forehead, writing is labor. Just as Mozart needed 10,000 hours practicing piano to reach The Marriage of Figaro, student writers benefit from battling through uncounted edits. Experience refining, rephrasing and reformulating ideas fosters the greatest progress, and you can spot a wellpracticed writer by flexible, resourceful and confident prose. I like to think my comments contribute too, but I sometimes wonder. Coaching writers is not that different from coaching runners: Writing five pages a day, like running five miles a day, makes the biggest difference. Comments do add an important element, though. Writers benefit from imagining a reader at the other end of their five pages, someone anticipating observations, illustrations or insights. Having something important to say covers a host of writing sins or, more accurately, makes the frustration and challenge of writing bearable. I would never downplay the mechanical accuracy that bolsters a reader's faith in the writer – but having commas in the right place won't save a lifeless effort. Good writing communicates spirit, the care with which the writer chose these words and phrased these thoughts. Not surprisingly, effective writers often love to read. They're eager to converse with writers they admire. They want to join the grand enterprise to express what matters most. Some students would love to hear 10 easy rules for effective writing and balk when I tell them, "There's really only one rule – make your mind heard." The hardest lesson is that articulating ideas requires comfort with discomfort. Sometimes those clouds oblige, but usually some struggle precedes the heavenly ray. I expect a few anguished e-mails before a paper's due date. It tells me something important is at stake. A couple of years ago, I received a one-word comment to accompany a rough draft of a Huck Finn essay. "Ugh," it said. That paper went through two more versions before the writer felt happy with it, but when she became dissatisfied with a subsequent paper, she sighed, "It least it's not as hard as Huck." That paper couldn't be as hard – because she'd already learned effort pays off. "Art is never finished," da Vinci said, "only abandoned." I'd extend that statement to include writing. With enough will, every composition can be improved. We English teachers try to ease students' anxiety by offering advice on introductions, thesis statements, topic sentences and paragraph sequences. Those elements lend essays structure, but every assignment makes its own demands, which is as it should be. A student who excels at writing stories, essays, historical analysis, poems and lab reports is as rare as an offensive tackle who also excels at synchronized diving. Different forms of writing not only help students find their talents but also make their writing more nimble and resourceful. Effective student writers draw on all their experience. While many object to timed writing, in some ways in-class essays mimic what they will encounter in real life. Most writing tasks don't come with assignments' requirements, guidelines or instructions. The author decides. The rhetorician Wayne C. Booth suggested composition begins the moment you conceive of writing. Considering your audience, the appropriate form and your purpose may be the most important moment. And though students may hate in-class essays, I love hearing a student's written voice – maybe for the first time – in those messy responses. The carnage of drafting is there in Technicolor. Perhaps every writer dreams of a fluent, flawless voice that arrives as if from the heavens, and I hope all my students achieve such skill. Their success as writers, however, will never truly rest on inspiration. The crossouts, carets, arrows and vertical sentences may disappear, but their ghosts will remain. Every vivid sentence, muscular verb and deft turn of phrase springs from the sloppy fields of practice, practice, practice. • Coaching writers is not that different from coaching runners: Writing five pages a day, like running five miles a day, makes the biggest difference. Latin School of Chicago 17

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