Things students have said to me:

• ‘I asked my teacher how long the essay needed to be and he said, “how long is a piece of string?”‘
• ‘Wait! You can start a sentence with ‘but’?’
• ‘What is the process for answering an essay question?’

These students attend good schools. They are above-average smart and capable. Yet somehow, despite towers of assignments and torrents of instruction, they lack basic writing skills and confidence.

Reflecting on my own experience and writing practice, this isn’t a huge surprise. The only explicit writing instruction that stuck with me was my seventh-grade teacher’s spiel on five-paragraph essays and, several years later, the guidance of creative non-fiction professor, Paul Hendrickson.

In between times, I was blundering much like my current students: writing without a clue.

In the end, I learned to write in the newsroom, not the classroom. Not because the student editors of the Daily Pennsylvanian were literary geniuses (though some likely grew into such) but because they worshipped at the altar of structure.

Head.

Subhead.

Lede.

Byline.

Pyramid.

The discipline of x-point headers and y-column inches taught me that writing is 95% organization.

However brilliant or clever or downright earth-shattering ones ideas, they are meaningless until organized and presented in a way that makes sense to a reader.

Put another way: to write well, one needs an audience, a reason to address them and strategy for delivering the message.

Based on my students’ comments, what they are getting, instead of practical, actionable teaching, is either prescriptive nonsense (‘don’t start a sentence with “but” or “and”‘ — er, why not?) or no meaningful guidance at all.

This leads to problematic assumptions, such as ‘you’re either good at writing, or you’re not’ or ‘it doesn’t matter if I write well because nobody is going to read it’ or, worse, ‘I’ll just ask ChatGPT.’

Problematic because students who do not learn to write all too often do not learn to think.

What students ask, day in day out, class after class, are not sophisticated technical questions about writing, but questions answerable with basic reasoning and critical thinking.

• How do I find evidence in the text?
• How do I know what a character is like?
• How can I write more about this topic?
• How do I explain this example?
• How do I know what the theme is?

What students need are blueprints and tools: structure.

In the newsroom, there is a basic means of getting information: the interview.

There are then standard, structured ways to render that information into articles.

Neophyte reporters were drilled in whowhatwhywherewhen. We learned our opinions were unwelcome without hard evidence behind them. We were taught attribution and verification; how to search archives and read microfiche. To my mortification, we were taught to go back and ask the same questions again, and if we got yelled at or told ‘no comment’ to write it down, because that was evidence too.

With due respect to my graduate school writing professors and peers, I learned a hundred times more in the newsroom than in the classroom. And it is no coincidence my most significant writing teacher was, yup, a journalist.

Not all students want to spend time in a newsroom, which is fine.

But every student deserves a classroom that gives them an equally fine set of tools.

‘[Language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish,’ George Orwell argued, ‘but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.’

To reverse the process requires a more structured, disciplined, logical approach to teaching writing.

It is a process in which the good writing produced is one-tenth of the iceberg; the crucial nine-tenths is intangible critical and creative thinking skills.

As an educator, I am committed to continuously developing more effective, engaging, efficient ways to teach students to think and write. Their future success — and the health of our societies — depends on it.

What thinking and writing skills are most important in your classroom? Share in the comments!