Why Johnny Can't, Like, Write

(Susan McCloskey is the president of McCloskey Writing Consultants, which provides a complete range of writing and editorial services to major U. S. law firms, Fortune 500 corporations, and private clients. She earned her Ph.D. in English literature at Princeton University and was a tenured member of the English Department and the director of the humanities program at Vassar College. Her essays on classic and contemporary theater have appeared in newspapers and journals; her articles on writing are featured in the New York State Bar Journal. She is often invited to speak to private and professional groups about literature and writing. She has lectured at the TOC Summer Seminar and now teaches the Effective Communications Workshop with David Kelley and William R Thomas. This article is an excerpt from McCloskey's speech, "Why Johnny Can't, Like, Write," which was given at the 1999 summer seminar.)

Every day, from a variety of sources, we gain proof that native speakers of English often have trouble communicating their thoughts to those who read their words. For example, I recently came across this sentence in a newspaper; its pronouns are so ambiguous that at least four meanings are possible: "The victim told the nurse that she had had intimate relations once with her boyfriend." Who had the intimate relations, the victim or the nurse? And whose boyfriend participated, the victim's or the nurse's? If the victim is the intended referent of one of these pronouns but not the other, the subsequent exchange between the victim and the nurse must have been lively indeed.

As this example demonstrates, confusing, inept, and ugly language is a part of our daily lives, an experience so common that we too often greet it with a dismissive shrug. Only on calm reflection are we likely to realize that such bad writing lowers our expectations about language. Instead of treating words as precision instruments, we come to think of them as fuzzy things—small strips of Velcro to which just about any meaning can adhere. The consequences of this casual tolerance are many. At the barely acceptable end of the spectrum, we are confused by language that does not communicate effectively. At the unacceptable end of the spectrum, where the ignorant misuse of language veers over into deliberate abuse, we are subjected as a nation to a president's self-serving meditations on possible meanings of the word "is." In short, the misuse of language can complicate our daily lives and, as George Orwell brilliantly pointed out, corrupt our politics.

Why is it that the channels of written communication buzz with the static that bad writing generates? The problem begins, I think, in our schools, to which we send Johnny in the hope that he will emerge with more than a fair grasp of a range of necessary knowledge and skills. Among them are the knowledge of his native tongue and the skill to communicate in it clearly, accurately, and maybe even with a modicum of grace. Curious to discover why Johnny can't, like, write, I have read the professional journals that teachers use to communicate with one another about pedagogic goals and methods. I have spoken with teachers and students about their experiences in classrooms. And since some of these classrooms are in the elite private schools of New York City, I have also spoken with parents who are baffled, sometimes outraged, by the tuition their tuition payments have not purchased. I cannot claim to have done exhaustive research about writing instruction throughout the nation. And I know there are hopeful exceptions to the generalizations on which some of my remarks today are based. But I think I have learned enough to know what's going on out there.

The Theory and Practice of Spontaneity
Many educators in our schools are passionate advocates of the Whole Language method of teaching children to read by comprehending their language as a whole, rather than by decoding the individual phonemes that make up the sounds of words. The latter method, phonics, is probably the one by which most of us learned to read. That is, we learned the range of sounds associated with the letters of the alphabet so that we could sound out the words we had not yet learned to recognize by sight. By contrast, Whole Language reading instruction assumes that reading is a natural extension of the process by which children learn to speak. If children are exposed a sufficient number of times to "authentic" literary texts, if they hear those texts read to them and try to read them themselves, they will come to recognize many of the words. They can skip or guess the meanings of the unfamiliar ones. That is, like attendees at a Berlitz crash course on the weekend before a trip to Paris, they will learn by immersion. Immerse a child long enough, the theory goes, and the child will someday "get" it.

The Whole Language method of teaching children to read also involves my true topic today, writing. As Whole Language instructors are fond of saying, children are not just consumers of language but producers, too. They learn to read, in part, by producing texts of their own, through which they experience the process of translating the text in their minds to the text on the page and then observing how readers of that text construct meanings from it. Children in Whole Language classrooms, for instance, write before they can read, rendering their thoughts in symbols of their choosing, whether drawings or an idiosyncratic alphabet, that may or may not be intelligible to others. This idea of small children as small authors has led to the development of Writers' Workshops as a widely used method of writing instruction, even in classrooms where the Whole Language approach has not taken hold. Here's how the Workshops work, at least in theory:

A space in the classroom is devoted to writing. Children are provided with everything from pencils and chalk to paints, markers, and computer terminals. They can write on plain or colored paper, wrapping paper, freezer paper, or strips of cardboard—whatever comes to hand. And they can visit this section of the classroom whenever the wish to write strikes them.

Most children will spend at least an hour a day engaged in writing, sometimes referred to in the journals as "textual production." They work on whatever it is they're trying to express until they conclude that they're ready to share it, at which point our small author, Johnny, sits in the designated Author's Chair, surrounded by his classmates, and reads aloud what he's written. The role of his classmates, explicitly, is to encourage Johnny's work. The role of the teacher is to join in this encouragement while the Writers' Workshop is in session and then to meet privately with Johnny to deal with those pesky little matters of capitalization, spelling, punctuation, grammar, sequence of thought, clarity of exposition, and so on. Occasionally, the teacher will sit in the Author's Chair and share what she has written, too.

Encouraging, Yes; Nonjudgmental, No
The Writers' Workshop approach has some merit, especially in the earliest grades. I like the idea that children are encouraged to write whenever they have something to say, about whatever strikes their young fancies. I also like the idea that every subject the child studies offers an opportunity for writing. And I am simply charmed by the image of little Johnny seated in the Author's Chair, a bite-sized textual producer reading what he's written. I like too the idea that the children will work, once or twice a year, to assemble and publish a collection of their writings for parents, friends, and neighbors. I like most of all that writing has come to be regarded as an essential skill worth developing from the very beginning of a child's formal education. Writers' Workshops aim to make writing the pleasant and entertaining work it can be, and up to a point, there seems no harm in that aim.

I'm less excited about some of the premises of the Writers' Workshops and about the practical implications of those premises. The first premise is that everything a child writes is the occasion for indiscriminate encouragement. No writer learns to write well through praise alone. If that were the case, our primary schools would be turning out competent writers at a breathtaking rate, and all talk of a "writing crisis" would cease. Writing is not a natural activity, like breathing, but a learned one, and there are many right and wrong ways to make one's words express what one wishes to say. But little Johnny isn't going to discriminate clearly, or at all, between what works and what doesn't if his teacher is intent on not telling him which is which, for fear of interfering with his development as a textual producer or injuring his unearned self-esteem.

I am also deeply uneasy that the teacher in a Writers' Workshop setting is not a teacher, but just another person who brings her work to the Author's Chair and responds appreciatively to Johnny's work. I can't imagine that Johnny is fooled even for a moment by this egalitarian impulse, forgets that Miss Apple is several feet taller and several pounds heavier than he, and looks rather odd all scrunched up in the little Author's Chair. More important, I'm sure that nothing is gained by this egalitarian act. If Miss Apple intends her compositions to be models for the children to imitate, other such models are widely available, chiefly between the covers of books. Teachers, however, are in shorter supply. When Johnny is most in need of guidance, most open to acquiring the new and complex skill that Miss Apple presumably possesses and he does not, Miss Apple is more interested in sending a message about the democracy of the classroom and the community of empowered learners.

I am most dismayed to find that instruction in the mere mechanics of good writing—matters such as grammar, punctuation, and spelling—has become the topic of an occasional private conference between little Johnny and Miss Apple, rather than the explicit, public, shared work of the entire class, something important enough to devote a part of the instructional day to. Long gone are the days when children diagrammed sentences, and perhaps it is just as well. I recall hating to diagram sentences, though I learned how sentences work despite my lack of enthusiasm.

The problem is that the rigors of sentence diagramming have not been replaced by more effective methods of instruction. They have been replaced by nothing at all, except Miss Apple's and little Johnny's occasional whispered conference while the other children in the room go about their work. (I have only read about these conferences on grammar, by the way. I have yet to meet a student or a teacher who actually recalls participating in one.) This retreat from formal grammar instruction is motivated by educators' concern that there's something oppressive about telling a child that there's a right and a wrong way to handle language. If Johnny is accustomed to say things such as, "My dog is fixin' to play outside. Does youse wanna go too?" and succeeds in communicating his dog's desire and his invitation to his friends, who is Miss Apple to insist that the child write, "My dog wants to play outside. Do you want to join him"? She does not hesitate to fill Johnny's head with fears that the electric power lines in his neighborhood will give him cancer. But it is oppressive, narrow-minded, and elitist to tell him that the third-person plural pronoun is not a correct substitute for the singular noun in the sentence, "A person can be whatever they want to be." Sustained by that conviction, Miss Apple does not have to waste precious class time on grammar instruction. And she will succeed in producing yet another generation of students with only the most glancing idea of the parts of speech, of the principles of agreement, coordination, and subordination, of the difference between a complete and an incomplete thought.

From Response to Revision
The Writers' Workshop approach to writing instruction strikes me as an opportunity largely wasted. In the journals I've read, teachers sometimes confess that coordinating the activities of the Writing Area, the Author's Chair, and the private conferences is time-consuming and extraordinarily demanding. One suspects that this is code language for "There aren't enough hours in the day for me to carry out these pedagogic responsibilities. Has anyone else out there been cutting corners, too?"

This difficulty could be overcome, I think, if Miss Apple stopped telling Johnny what a good little writer he is and started teaching him, if she used the opportunity of the Writer's Workshop to show Johnny and the other children how to respond intelligently to Johnny's effort. Let me illustrate what I mean.

Suppose Johnny shares this piece of writing with his classmates:

i like my tranisoris rex

i like to ride on its back

he sleeps outside

A teacher could show the children listening to Johnny's effort how to respond to it in helpful, instructive ways. She might ask, "What else could Johnny tell us about his pet dinosaur that would make it more interesting to hear about? I wondered, for instance, what its name is and how big it is. Does Johnny have to climb a ladder to get on its back? What does its back feel like? Is its skin soft or is it protected by scales? Why does the dinosaur sleep in the backyard? Is it too big for the basement? What does it do when it's raining?" Such questions encourage Johnny and his audience to think more vividly and specifically about what they write, to observe more carefully and to render what they observe, to think about ways to make what interests them interesting to others. Such questions, in short, develop habits of observation and expression. They also educate an imagination, not just for a few minutes or hours, but for a lifetime.

Grammar instruction is a fairly easy thing to slip into this potentially rich mix. If I were Johnny's teacher, I would note that Johnny put each of his thoughts about the dinosaur on a separate line. While that's one way of indicating where one thought ends and another begins, there's another method that writers use. Then I'd show Johnny how to indicate the beginning of a new thought by using a capital letter and how to mark its closing with a period. And I'd show Johnny what I meant:

I like my tranisorus rex. I like to ride on its back. He sleeps outside.

I would also ask Johnny if he would like to find out more about dinosaurs on the Internet. If he would, he'll need to spell key words, like "tyrannosaurus," properly. He may even be interested to know what the Greek name of the dinosaur means and how dinosaurs acquired Greek names in the first place.

I'd also ask Johnny to explain why he refers to the dinosaur as "it" in the second sentence and "he" in the third. I'd tell him and his classmates that both those words are called pronouns, words that take the place of nouns. They're extremely handy because they keep us from having to use nouns over and over again to express our meaning. But, I'd point out, pronouns can be confusing. Wouldn't Johnny be confused if I said, "Johnny is in first grade. He is learning to write. It likes to write about dinosaurs"? Because Johnny's own writing created the same confusion, Johnny needs to solve the problem.

With those thoughts to ponder, to which not only Johnny but all his classmates were exposed, I'd send Johnny back to the Writing Area to think about these suggestions and put them to use. Such questions and observations, such experiences with the real work of writing—revision—teach a child how to handle the rudiments of written communication. They are not repressive; they do not crush Johnny's creativity. They make him a writer, a real and effective user of language.

From Expression to Exposition
The Writers' Workshop model, as you may have gathered, also emphasizes writing as a means of self-expression—not a bad idea in the earliest grades, where children are learning to form letters, put letters together in words, and form words into sentences. But self-expression is only one of the things writing is designed to accomplish. It is also meant to bridge the distance between one human being's mind and another's—in short, to communicate. Tots in the primary grades probably don't have much to communicate about the anthropic theory of cosmology or the redemptive theme of Shakespeare's late plays. But they quickly acquire enough information about the world to be capable of communicating something besides their own experiences. Yet the emphasis on writing as self-expression persists, as far as I can tell, all the way through what we once accurately referred to as grammar school—that is, right up to the point where not-so-little Johnny is delivered into the clutches of his high school English teachers and introduced, rather late in the game, to the challenges and rewards of expository prose. The age of reason, which used to be seven, has now been postponed to thirteen or fourteen.

This long delay is a terrible pity and a waste of rational young minds. Third and fourth graders, after all, engage in definition, explanation, analysis, and argument all the time. Most can probably define what a URL is, or explain how to program a VCR, or argue the relative merits of the two Austin Powers movies. What earthly reason is there to postpone until high school the mastery of such essential reasoning and writing skills? I can think of no reasons, but I can think of a few explanations.

One is that the graduates of schools of education have been told that children aren't ready, before the later grades, to engage in higher-order reasoning—a belief that can be sustained only by not listening at all to the ways children deal with one another and the world. The current orthodoxy holds that to ask a child to write a piece of persuasion involving logical argumentation is to stunt his soul's development, to place too heavy a burden upon his young mind, to guarantee frustration, even to snuff out Johnny's desire to learn.

The current orthodoxy is also sustained by the paucity of good teachers. It is easy to let little Johnny spend the first eight or nine years of his education writing little pieces about his personal experience, easy to set low standards for achievement, easy to dole out praise and encouragement, easy to abandon the hard task of explaining what subjects and verbs are and why they have to agree. By contrast, it is difficult—difficult, but not impossible—to make exciting the slow, sometimes rote, work of teaching a child how to use his own language in a way that makes his ideas, not just his feelings or experiences, comprehensible to others.

What to Do—and Why
Remember that teachers are responsible for teaching, and parents therefore have a right to demand more of the schools their children attend. Advocates of the Whole Language approach complain that parents want them to teach grammar and spelling and punctuation, and they seem to regard such demands as evidence that they are dealing with a benighted population. Be one of those benighted parents. When Johnny brings home a piece of writing on which Miss Apple has lavished her praise but not her instruction, take it to Parents' Night and ask her why Johnny is still spelling according to his own private system, doesn't know that an object of a preposition can't be the subject of a sentence, and has yet to write anything beyond a single page. And get angry when Miss Apple tells you that Johnny's self-expression and developing sense of himself as a textual producer are more important than spelling or punctuation, which are merely conventional. Bolder assaults are also possible. The students I tutor sometimes show me notes from their teachers in which the language is mishandled within an inch of its communicative life. Get in the habit of sending these notes back to the school's principal with your corrections. In other words, be obnoxious, if that's what it takes to make sure your child is being taught what he needs to learn by a person competent to teach him.

A less confrontational way to deal with the Miss Apples of the world is to inoculate your child against their effects. You can teach your pre-school children the alphabet and spark their passion to read and write by reading and writing to them and by teaching them to read and write themselves. Giving your children the gift of literacy can be enjoyable in itself and marvelous in its results. When very little Johnny draws a picture of his house or his dog or his brothers and sisters, encourage him to identify in words the figures he's drawn: "house," "dog," "Timmy," "Sheila." Show him how to form those words and match them to the proper picture. When Johnny is older, encourage him to write sentences as legends under his pictures: "My house is red." "My dog chases the frisbee." "Timmy plays catch with Sheila." When Johnny wants you to know what he'd like for his birthday, ask him to make a list. A very young child can dictate the list to you and then copy it over, learning in the process how to form the letters and the words and see the connection between the words and his heart's desire. Write messages to your children; help them to read and understand them and to use the words of your message to write a message in return. It is easy and exhilarating for a child to turn "Mommy loves Johnny" into "Johnny loves Mommy." It is even more exciting when the child comes to recognize the words in a message without your assistance and to create messages on his own. Think about how wildly excited children are to receive a letter in the mail. Send them letters now and then and enjoy the excitement. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to make a child eager to decipher writing and create it himself. And if the pleasure of mastery runs deep enough, Johnny will remain a writer no matter what Miss Apple does or doesn't do.

Establishing writing as something that occurs routinely in the family setting is especially beneficial for school-age children, who will be called upon to write more and more—that is, if they're lucky and if the human passion to discover and make meaning hasn't been stamped out early. Parental involvement in writing for school poses special problems, though. When Johnny is required to write a report on the political, cultural, and social life of Argentina—an all too typical assignment—parents should resist the impulse to which too many parents yield: to do the research and write the report themselves. Johnny will learn nothing from your efforts. At precisely the point in his development when he needs to experience the difficulties and rewards of creative work, you will thwart that development. It is true that Johnny will receive a grade far higher than the one his unassisted classmates can hope to receive, but giving him that advantage now will succeed only in making him less prepared for the greater demands that his teachers will one day place on him. Johnny needs to learn how to do this work himself and needs to know that there is usually a correlation between the effort he expends and the grade he receives.

But this hands-off policy doesn't mean that parental input is verboten. Johnny probably doesn't have a clue about Argentina and its social, political, and cultural life, and he probably has less than a clue about how to beat back the frontiers of his ignorance. You can help him by taking an interest in the problem he faces, by taking him to the library, by showing him how to use the Internet. And you can ask him about what he's learning and encourage him through conversation to take full possession of that knowledge. When he's ready to organize his ideas, you can talk with him about his approach. And when he's written a draft, you can read and react to it—without an editorial pencil in hand—telling him what you find interesting or what you don't understand. You can observe that you don't see how this paragraph develops from the paragraph before it, or point out that a misspelling here or a grammar problem there interrupted your reading, distracting you from what Johnny was saying to the confusing way in which he said it. And then you need to leave Johnny alone. The problems are Johnny's to solve, and the consequences of not solving them and the satisfactions of succeeding should be his, too.

The suggestions I'm making will make your child a competent writer, sooner or later. Some of you may want to take the next step, to make your child drunk on language, one who dreams in words and savors them on his tongue, one who enjoys their textures, who wants to know all about them and write them out of sheer delight in their possibilities and charms. If that's your aim, there are other things you can do.

You can be the kind of parent whom your child sees reaching for a dictionary or consulting a handbook of grammar to discover a word's meaning or sort out a point of usage. It's good for a child to see that mastering our splendid, sometimes unruly, language is a life-long enterprise. My own father whetted my appetite for words whenever I watched him solving a crossword puzzle. He was a busy man, yet I saw that this game with words was and remains a source of keen pleasure to him. Sometimes he would ask me to get the dictionary for him and check the meaning and spelling of the word that seemed a likely answer to 22 Across. I felt privileged to be included and grew to love the unusual words I looked up—among them "eleemosynary," "kerfuffle," "tintinnabulation." My mother occupied me and my fractious brothers and sisters on many a car trip by focusing our attention on the license plate in front of us and asking us how many words we could form by rearranging its letters. (This task was more stimulating, I realize, when license plates were made up of letters alone, not letters and numerals combined.) But I remember competing with my younger brother and sister to find a truly dazzling word, one that neither of them would see. You can amuse your children on a rainy day by giving them a simple sentence, such as "The boy walked," and inviting them to come up with as many ways as possible to make the sentence more specific, detailed, and vivid by adding modifiers or rearranging the word order. Sometimes such a sentence can become the stimulus to a story and the occasion for a child to write at length. Sometimes such a sentence can turn a child into a poet.

Those of us who are aunts and uncles rather than fathers and mothers can contribute to our nieces' and nephews' development as writers, too. When my niece Simone was a fourth-grader, she and I began an e-mail correspondence. I made a conscious choice to write to her as I would write to an adult. I didn't dumb-down my vocabulary, I didn't simplify my sentence structures. When she asked me what a particular word meant, I encouraged her to look it up. When she responded vaguely to one of my questions about her schoolwork—when she wrote, for instance, that her science class was soooo dull—I asked her to tell me what made it dull. When she figured out that almost any general observation she made would provoke a volley of questions from me, she learned to focus her thoughts, to write more specifically, to use language to make vivid to me what she was interested in or bored by, what she was thinking about, what she was learning, why her younger sisters drove her nuts. Over the course of the year, her writing became more sophisticated, her vocabulary more extensive, her observations more interesting. Far more quickly than I would have thought possible, I stopped regarding an e-mail from my niece as an opportunity to teach her something and started looking forward to receiving it.

The suggestions I'm making are all designed to make language interesting to children and to make writing an everyday, engaging way of putting language to use. If you want other suggestions, indeed an entire program of writing instruction for at-home use, you might pick up Any Child Can Write by Harvey S. Wiener. He is an imaginative teacher whose response to the poverty of writing instruction in the schools has been to make such instruction a part of children's daily experience at home. It is a practical, not a theoretical, guide. When I read it, I wished that I had a small child in my care who was learning for the first time to make words work.

Wordcraft as Soulcraft
In closing, I want to say a few words about why it matters that Johnny can't write. I have spent my entire professional life dealing with writers—not only Princeton and Vassar undergraduates and now attorneys, but Homer and Sophocles, Dante and Ariosto, Shakespeare and Milton, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. And I have come to believe that writing is more than a powerful means of communication. It is also a means to the end of a full and a fully rational life.

We write to make sense. There are exceptions to this generalization, of course—and Ayn Rand skewered them in the character of Lois Cook, the so-called novelist in The Fountainhead. But the generalization usually holds, even at the simplest, most routine level. For instance, when we write down the items we need to pick up at the store, we're making sense, singling out from the universe of possible purchases the items that fulfill our needs. When we make a to-do list, we're recording our objectives and the steps we must take to achieve them, making practical sense of our values and their relative priority.

We make sense, of course, in more complex ways. As soon as we choose to put our thoughts on paper to share them with others, we are subjecting our minds to a rigorous discipline. We are taking the often inchoate jumble of our ideas and working to make sense of them and to make them available to other human beings whose only access to our thoughts is the written word. To accomplish that task, we make use of our reason. We define what we want to write and the terms we use in writing it; we classify our ideas, recognizing that this thought goes with this one, but not with this; we put them in a sequence and try to clarify the logic of that sequence; we marshal the evidence that supports our points; we decide that this word, and not that one, better expresses our meaning. In short, in writing we bathe the contents of our minds in the white light of reason. And we discover that those contents are sometimes worth the rational effort of expressing them and sometimes not worth a damn.

The writing that is good for our minds is perhaps even better for our souls. When we make an entry in a journal or write to a friend or lover, we're making sense of our lives, of what we have been thinking or doing, of the experiences we have had or missed, of the values we're seeking to realize, the problems we're sorting through. Writing of this sort takes us on a journey of self-knowledge, as we struggle and succeed or fail in rendering on the page the nature and texture of our inner life. Our world teems with letters, diaries, journals, personal essays, memoirs, confessions, and autobiographies because literate human beings have long found that writing is a means to make the soul visible, if only to oneself. The act of expressing oneself in words helps us to clarify and sharpen, finally to understand, the self being expressed. Socrates was surely right that the unexamined life is not worth living. He examined his own through philosophical dialogue; some of us examine ours through dialogue with therapists. But long before Freud, most people interested in that examination conducted it by the definingly human act of writing.

It matters that Johnny can't write, then, because a person who cannot command his language effectively may never develop the habits of rational thought. He will seldom experience how it feels to grip his ideas between his mental teeth and bite down, hard, to discover whether they're made of gold or tin. He will find self-knowledge more difficult to achieve and will lose a means to make himself known to others. That's why we should care about the kind of instruction we offer little Johnny from the time he is pre-schooler. We want him to make sense of and to himself and to make sense to others. Then his life will be an examined one, well worth living.