Author’s note: I have recently re-entered school to pursue my specialist (and perhaps then, my doctorate) in Secondary English Education. As a part of a digital literacy in education course during this my first semester, I was assigned to write a multimodal literacy narrative. You can see that literacy narrative here.
In the process of writing that narrative, though, I dug up this narrative, written during the first year of the last time I went back to school. It still rings true, though the familial references are all outdated: Will is now 11, and he has two younger siblings.
EVERY EVENING, my wife and I take turns getting our son Will ready for bed. In addition to bathing him, dressing him, brushing his teeth and tucking him in, we make it a point to read to him each night. At least one book, and often at his insistence several books. (He is quite the rhetorician himself.) We have been doing it since he was born, and now he is likely to refuse to fall asleep unless we read him a couple of books beforehand.
Since I entered graduate school a year ago, I have been more involved than ever in the complex interactions of text and mind that add up to my own literacy. I have conducted written interactions with difficult and abstruse and compelling texts from several academic disciplines, and I have found some success and a great deal of exhilaration in synthesizing what are seemingly disparate and disconnected ideas. E’en so, there are few things I value more than the time I spend reading to my son.
Our favorite books recently have been by Dr. Seuss. Green Eggs and Ham and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish are popular requests, with Hop on Pop and Go Dog, Go! Following close behind. (I know as well as you, of course, that Go Dog, Go! is not written by Dr. Seuss but rather by P. D. Eastman. I am also rather certain in my conviction that you, like I, shelve them side by side, a phenomenon which could offer interesting insights about our most basic conceptions of authorship.) When we read Dr. Seuss together, he reads the author’s name on the book’s cover. This reading business started with Byron Barton, an author of simple children’s books that I didn’t know anything about until Will introduced me to him. He and Beth found Barton’s books at the library. His artwork is really simple—concrete, geometrical. Bold lines and bold colors. My Car actually looks like it was created in MS paint.
The story is equally simple. Sam loves his car, and he takes good care of it. But he also gets to drive a bus. Add to that the obvious alignment of personal interest and subject matter—Will loves cars almost as much as he loves buses; another of Barton’s books, titled simply Trucks, is equally well aligned—and you have the recipe for a classic. My Car was the first book that Will could read. We took turns reading pages.
Now we read Dr. Seuss. We have a great collection between us. Beth has a lot of her originals, from when she was growing up. The one’s my mom read to my sister and me and my brother are gone, but she started to rebuild my collection through a series of Christmas gifts extending over several years. My mom says I loved Dr. Seuss when I was little. That’s why she started giving them to me. Now, she gives new editions to Will.
My mom read to me a lot when I was younger, too. When I was in first or second grade, she read The Hobbit before bed every night for a month. And my dad was pretty much a sucker for buying me a book if I asked for it. I read Asimov before I can remember. I was real into Michael Crichton and John Grisham for a little while. In middle school I didn’t read much, except whatever was assigned. In high school I was less than motivated to read the usual academic fare, but I also had a couple of far out English teachers who got me into Bob Dylan and Cormac McCarthy and Kurt Vonnegut and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I also, for reasons which lie beyond my recollection, read heavily in the existentialist novel—The Stranger, The Plague, Notes from the Underground. My junior year I did an independent study on Thomas Pynchon’s early fiction. My term paper focused on entropic principles.
I have always liked science proper as well. In fact, my interest in science fiction grows out of my curiosity regarding the natural world. Science has a wonderful mythology. A most beautiful geography and ecology. I remember reading a lot of books about dinosaurs when I was younger. I also used to get the Eyewitness Books Series, each of which was like an illustrated encyclopedia on a certain topic, and before that I had some subscription where they send you a big plastic box for index-cards and then every month they send you a few of these index-cards with pictures of different animals and information about each one. AP Chemistry was probably the most challenging course I took in high school, and I am confident that if I put my mind to it, I could remember most of what I learned in the class in 3 days. I actually entered college as a Chemistry major (with a big ol’ science scholarship) before I was seduced by the Humanities. Even then, I started reading a lot of layman’s science: A Brief History of Time, The Elegant Universe; Bill Bryson’s A Brief History of Nearly Everything is one of my favorite books of all time. I wrote my Physics term paper on time travel.
Recently I’ve been reading a lot of popular fiction again. Genre fiction. Mostly Science Fiction and Fantasy. It’s so fun to read. The first two of George R. R. Martin’s books are more entertaining than television. Intrigue and sex and honour and violence. He does a great job with geography and ecology. The same can be said of William Gibson, who is my other favorite new author. I read a lot of left-leaning journalism. And I’m always reading social theory now: most recently Foucault and Jameson and N. Katherine Hales. I also read a YA novel by Scott Westerfeld called Uglies, which is also Sci-Fi and one of a trilogy, and actually features epic hoverboard sequences.
HERE, I’VE BEGUN an essay about writing with a great deal of talk about reading and not much talk about writing at all. No matter: the two go hand in hand. We all read before we can write, and were in good shape if we can continue that habit. Reading seems like an inevitable precursor to writing. Ideas do not come from nowhere; rather, they spring from other ideas. My best writing occurs when I feel compelled to join a conversation—with an author, a story, an idea—that has been going on without me for some time.
That being said, until quite recently I had rarely written for recreation. I think wrote some short stories and poems (now lost and forgotten) in elementary school. In fifth grade I co-wrote a short movie script called Rose (which still exists) with a fellow dweeb who went on to become an extremely successful rock musician. The premise: Someone has murdered rose using a miniaturized atomic bomb. Two suave laboratory scientists set out to solve the crime. Part noir, part sci-fi, part international intrigue. And this was in the days before CSI and Investigation Discovery. I wrote a great many notes to middle school and high school sweethearts. Some of these, if I know my ex-girlfriend, probably still exist as well. I co-wrote a high-school theater variety show with one of the best minds of my generation. In eleventh grade, we also collaborated on writing and staging a short minimalist absurdist drama. In college I tried my hand at poetry, and was even (once) published in the university’s student literary publication. I’ve started countless blogs, most recently this past spring when I determined not only to undertake several ‘green’ projects—growing a vegetable garden, building rain barrels, composting—but also to write about them. Indeed, my personal blog reads like a historical document to my personal writing project false starts.
Most of the writing I have done in my life (I’m willing to bet as much as 85 percent by word count) has been as the result of an assignment. I have been told to write, by a teacher of one ilk or another, and often within the context of a formal learning environment: a classroom. Writing has been demanded of me, of a certain type (usually an essay), on a certain topic (usually a book), and by a certain date (usually too soon to give it any serious and extended thought). In this, I’ll bet I’m similar to most people. I have written more papers in my life on William Shakespeare than on any other single topic. I have known a great deal about Fitzgerald’s use of symbolism for as long as I have known anything about symbolism at all. And this must be my bazillionth autobiography.
Attending graduate school has shifted my attitudes toward writing. Most markedly, perhaps, is my mature realization that what I want to read and write about and what I must read and write about need not lie forever on separate planes. I believe that if you want to be a successful writer, if your writing is going to be relevant, even to feel relevant enough in your mind to merit writing about, it is probably going to have to be about something that you are doing or something that you have done, or something that you want to do. All the better if it’s something that you need help with. I am also pretty certain that reading is the best thing a writer can do to improve his or her writing–aside from writing, perhaps. Read whatever is interesting, or read about what interests you. But it’s also important that one thing that interests you enough to read about it is writing. It is certainly something that you need help with.
My own preferred writing process has also become much clearer since graduate school made writing an inevitable and invited element of my weekly routine. I love the blog as a medium for literary development. I have made blogging an integral part of my own writing process. Taking an idea to press, no matter how small the audience, gives me the motivation to shape it thoughtfully. I take digital notes when I read social theory, and I post interesting news items to Facebook and comment and elicit comment on them. I love to freewrite, and I love the smooth transition from a current event, a meandering freewrite and a set of quotes to a publishable blog. For me, blogs are still very low stakes—I expect few readers—but they are public, so the possibility is always there.
I also find that I write best in all the wrong order. For example, the paragraph that I am typing now is (currently) about three quarters of the way down the first page of a three-page document. What happens is, I get stuck at the bottom, so I start to reread. When something strikes me, I add. My essays often begin as a string of rather disconnected sentences with a great deal of white space in between. Then, as I add to an early idea, I find that suddenly it has lead to a later one. I make the adjustments and, voila, a paragraph. And so forth and so on. I am a great advocate for this ‘organic’ development method. I find that it produces writing with an internal logic that is subtle and enticing.
I just need to get this off my chest before I can go any further: The 5-paragraph essay model is the most insidious force in writing instruction today. In my most conservative moments, I’d allow it in the curriculum until the end of fifth grade. The most successful essays I have written have only been achieved by suspending, at all cost, my preconceived expectations for an introduction, to say nothing of a thesis. The five paragraph model teaches you that your thesis is the thing you’re going to prove. In fact, the best theses, those that make for the most complex and compelling writing, are those that you end up proving, often despite yourself.
I sometimes think that word, thesis, is tainted for students beyond repair and must be shelved for a generation so that its current reputation might be forgotten. When I was teaching high school Language Arts, I had this bit I did for Beth when I would bring home student essays to grade. I would lift the stack of papers to my nose and inhale deeply in the style of a 1920s gangster smelling a jug of milk. “Ugh,” I’d say, pulling away, “Smells like theses.” The joke is that theses sounds like feces, and most of them were, in fact, pretty shitty. I might abandon as well the word introduction, and it’s even more troubling ‘counterpart,’ the conclusion, opting instead perhaps to revert to narrative terms. What’s so wrong with beginning, middle, and end. My favorite essays, no matter how technical the material, read like stories.
Indeed, it is through the lens of narrative that I often offer my students a working alternative to the five-paragraph essay. I will force them to begin their essay with an anecdote, a specific autobiographical example which illustrates the point that they are trying to make. It is often the very last thing that I have them write, and it often grows out of an early draft body paragraph that is excised and stuck on top and revised for detail and clarity.
Teachers have an important role to play in shaping interests. There is no getting around that, I’m afraid. We must believe wholeheartedly that learning is morally and ethically right and good. And so we must define, more or less, what learning is. That, of course, is a can of worms. Questioning the status quo seems deep down to be an important part of learning, and yet, as teachers we are inevitably one arm of that status quo. I know that all my favorite teachers incited learning by rocking the boat ever so slightly, creating some sense of alarm, however insignificant, at the horror of new insight.
Everything is an argument. Most things are at least three arguments. This is no different in writing, except that writing has the unique power to do a fair job translating really complex arguments and sets of arguments between different bodies. (I say bodies instead of minds because there is a physical element to good writing that springs from a sort of call to action. There is a dramatic unfolding in good writing. There is geography and ecology.) Really good teachers are good at getting you to discover an argument or two in the things that you encounter. It is best if these things are other texts, and if the arguments are complex. And even if this sort of analytical prodding requires students to gain a healthy skepticism of things-as-they-are, it must needs not turn them into radical Marxists.
The part of this essay in which I discussed my being early influenced by Outkast and west coast hip-hop got cut in a later draft. I insert the note here as (empty) pretext for sharing the most recent text that has grabbed my attention:
Laugh if you want to, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this counts as literacy too.