POSITION PAPER

by Cliff Laverty

This essay that my father did for a class he was taking in the 1960s on teaching children to write reminds me of the position of Joseph Gold's book: "The Story Species: Our Life-Literature Connection" -- Where Gold was writing about the critical importance of reading literature in order to understand ourselves, this looks at the same goal from the perspective of doing the writing. Here are my father's words:

My Position on the teaching of writing at the senior high school level remains fundamentally unchanged at the end of this institute: students must write in the light of their own experiences or valid vicarious experiences. The basic Procedures have been supported by enough speakers to give me, perhaps, more confidence that pre‑writing writing, sharing, rewriting, sharing, rewriting, and editing are valid points along the hard road to producing a finished manuscript.

My purpose is to help students communicate their feelings and reactions to an experience to someone else in such a way that it will touch a responsive note somewhere in the reader's experience. This can be done in a step‑by‑step procedure in which the student comprehends one step before going to another and then uses them as tools in shaping the finished product.

Prewriting stands as a natural first step, and in this very important preparation I have received several ideas that have not occurred to me before. The idea of brainstorming is so simple and powerful that the wonder is that it has eluded me until now. The many forms of brainstorming augment the idea notebook, which is a form of brainstorming but not as concentrated.

All narratives include a setting, people, action, points of view, and often include dialogue to give them reality. The student visits a place with which he is familiar and then learns to describe it. He learns that he does not need a complete description to touch base with his readers. If he mentions a farmhouse, the reader has seen farmhouses. If he alludes to that farmhouse as rundown or carefully tended, the reader has seen these in his own experience.

The writer then applies the same method to introducing a person. He reminds the reader of a person the reader has seen or knows, and an instant image appears that is meaningful to the reader. He describes a person in the light of that person's dominant characteristics.

At ease now with people and places, the budding writer now experiments with putting people into a place where there is action. This becomes a little more complicated because he now meets the five senses and must communicate sensory detail that the reader can identify. But with people and places out of the way, he can concentrate on this new experience.

Studying, discussing, and writing about points of view serve two purposes. For one thing he can make his narrative more interesting by seeing the incident through the eyes of a particular character or by changing to the point of view of another character. In the second place the teenage writer is no longer the center of the stage, and he sees the same incident through the eyes and feelings of several different people. He discovers that different people with different experiences in their backgrounds see events differently.

The student discovers dialogue. He can reveal personalities. He can save time by starting his narration in the middle of the action and bring his reader up‑to‑date as the characters communicate with one another. It becomes a valuable tool in giving realism to a story or an account.