How do you teach kids to write: through the spirit or the law? That is, should writing be taught through careful attention to grammar, syntax, and composition? Or should the first task be encouraging youngsters to pour their hearts upon the page without regard for subjects, verbs, and objects? While hedging its bets just a bit, Educational Leadership lines up with the latter view this month, in a series of articles on teaching writing. As editor Marge Scherer assures us, "Log into a blog or two or sneak a peek at students' instant messaging and you will find that the art of writing is alive and well. The voice, the substance, the interest, and the humor are there, even if the grammar, the spelling, and the topic sentences are often not." This is not a worthwhile trade, in our opinion. (And we have to wonder if Scherer has ever seen many actual instant messages, which usually read something like, "WU? WAN2TLK DIS WKND?" In fact, teachers are beginning to complain that IM-speak is making its way into formal essays, even among college students.) We tend to take the former view, that style and panache are the product of careful mastery of the rules, and that one good way to master them is to learn how to diagram sentences. So we were amused to read novelist Kitty Burns Florey's witty reminiscence of diagramming sentences in elementary school. Gadfly spent many years diagramming under the stern tutelage of nuns, and is a better writer for it. As it turns out, style, interest, and humor in writing actually do have something to do with knowing - if not necessarily always following - the rules.
"Sister Bernadette's barking dog," by Kitty Burns Florey
"Writing!" Educational Leadership, October 2004
"Keeping slang out of student's homework," by Andrea Perry, Daily Ardmoreite, September 24, 2004