Put up with the pain of writing better     044

With high school students, particularly those in Years 11 and 12, writing seems to be something which is done in response to an assessment task. It might be pre-prepared to a large extent, or done at home and then handed in. There are also short answers to questions on three or four different types of written texts, presented unseen, during examinations.

The point is that the focus of the writing is to make a task related response at a particular point in time. This process is unlikely to change. However it does take away much of the creativity as the journey of writing is curtailed. This is what today’s blog post is all about. As parents you can support your child by explaining how quality is achieved, and how professional writers go about the business of writing.

In most situations writing should be planned, and this plan should be revised extensively before your child begins to write. Children typically never plan, or if they do plan they make no improvements, simply writing out a list, or even worse, a jumble of sentences. And before planning should come research, or at the very least a period of extended thinking. Planning is like packing for a trip and booking your ticket—in both cases the purpose is the same, to effectively arrive at the destination.

Then comes the process of writing, and by and large this should proceed without interruption, without any regard for quality whatsoever. In this way the creative flow will be given full rein, and connections will be logical and well placed. So many teachers spoil the creative process by insisting upon correct grammar, syntax and spelling, and with older children adherence to the latest writing structure—and amazingly each school seems to have invented its own—such as topic sentence, link with the essay thesis, evidence, techniques and so on. I have referred to this aspect of writing elsewhere in ‘Children writing backwards but expecting to go forwards’.

And then for most children the task is done, and the pen and keyboard are put away, and the waiting begins for the teacher to mark the work and provide feedback. Unfortunately this has more to do with testing or evaluating the writing, and less to do with teaching the process of writing. Good writing, or at least the best the child can do, is produced by understanding that writing is a long journey with many setbacks. The pain of the journey is entirely normal but this is not understood.

First, writing takes time. Longer pieces of writing, such as are necessary for senior high school students, should be worked on over a period of days. Suppose your child has some time on the weekend, let’s say, but for your child that time seems to be too short, or your child is not in the mood to write, or perhaps feeling tired or even sick. Well this is precisely the time that the writing must commence and be continued. That is what professional writers do, they write.

We are all familiar with Roald Dahl’s writing hut, located in his backyard, where he did much of his writing. BFG, Roald’s own favourite, took some 600 hours, working seven days a week (Donald Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, London: Harper Collins, 2010, p. 521), and this with the constant pain of his many spinal operations. Writing then is something to be worked on, day in day out, to a regular timetable. Encourage your child in this. His or her own writing is like Mum or dad going to work—many days they may not feel like going to work but they do.

Quality takes time, and painstaking attention to detail. The BFG has about 158 full pages, excluding all illustrations. That means that Roald Dahl, in total, spent between three and four hours on the writing of each page!  Consider the business of making movies. Dozens and dozens of people spend months and even years working on something that will last a little over two hours. Even putting make-up on, for one scene, might take three hours. Consider the movie Pirates of the Caribbean, with actor Johnny Depp playing the role of Captain Jack Sparrow. For this role he sports a number of gold plated teeth, but the number of teeth, according to the ‘bonus material’ was a matter of some disagreement between Mr Depp and his director. Quality is detail, and detail must be considered and revised over time. It isn’t surprising then that so many children become discouraged so quickly when they see the results of what is really only a first draft.

At school sometimes students are encouraged to submit drafts of their written work, and then use the teacher feedback to increase the quality even more. I once taught a student who gained over 90 per cent in all his HSC subjects, and attended a special award ceremony.  He never grew tired of rewriting his English essays, perhaps four or five complete rewrites for each one. The best aspect of this relentless pursuit of quality was that it was student initiated, student driven and student sustained. Encourage your children to pay the price of quality. This principle can be talked about as being something part of everyday life, for the principle often arises. Quality costs.

In your child’s writing assessment marks and results will vary. Writing outcomes just naturally do. All authors and music composers for that matter will have some texts or compositions which become better known and more famous than the others, and yet probably equal time and effort was put in. Everyone producers a piece of bad writing from time to time, just as within a piece of writing there are paragraphs which do not contribute or  simply go nowhere. You can communicate this idea to your child by simply not getting upset about one or two bad English marks. Consider the trend, the big picture. This principle applies, I might add, particularly to interpreting NAPLAN results, and I have written about it in the post ‘Your child’s NAPLAN results—what do they mean and should you be worried?’

All content copyright—Mark Thackray—Australian Educational Services