WRITING REVISITED

 

The skills of being able to write have again hit the headlines here in Sin City. Jordan Baker’s article, Writing wrongs: ‘Our society is about to hit a literacy crisis’ (The Sydney Morning Herald; 19 September 2020), attempts to highlight the ever-increasing chasm between the spoken and the written word and that this ‘disconnect’ is most evident in our school and university students and aspiring teachers.

It seems that writing is heading towards Hades in terms of accuracy, readability and quality. To make matters even worse, Dr Russell Daylight, an English lecturer at Charles Sturt University, asserts that business people, bureaucrats and journalists form part of the cohort struggling with the skills of coherent writing. One can only assume that COVID-19’s tentacles have reached victims’ grey matter or, at least, the magical Language Acquisition Devices in their temporal lobes. ‘Shit for brains’ has now taken on one new meaning/ application and the world of communication is the poorer due to the pandemic.

What I find most surprising about these disclosures is exactly that- they’re treated as disclosures! If there has been anything constant in School Land over the last decade, it’s the waning performances of students in the writing components of literacy testing whether at the national level (according to NAPLAN) or internationally (via PISA rankings). A ‘heads-up’ on the death of writing in 2020 is about as useful as similar calls to arms in previous years. Now if I was a gambling bot, I’d run a book on ‘Writing Chaos’ making the headlines at about this time in 2021 and I reckon that I’d make a bloody killing on Bet 365.

There are so many issues surrounding writing and its central position within literacy that you could produce a tome and piss everyone off in the process. My short list would include-

·       Writing has declined as a skill in many punters…and I mean generally. This decline is not peculiar to school students or would-be teachers but to society as a whole.

·       Social media sites had the potential to really encourage writing but the reality falls far short. The ‘Awww thanks, hun’ automated response to everything from ‘You look fabulous’ to an image displaying a peanut butter fish finger creates a watering down of meaning to the point where it’s unintelligible. If you think I’m employing exaggeration as a literary device, you’re wrong. Take a stroll around any facebook wall and you’ll recognise it within two minutes. You can almost set your watch by the predictability of postings and the resuscitated/ recycled vocabulary. 

·       A suitable pedagogy for the teaching of writing within schools appears to be as unachievable as it is untaggable. The fact that the N.S.W. Education Standards Authority is currently conducting a review of how writing is taught in the great state’s schools demonstrates that confusion and lack of direction form significant components of the instructional profile. Fuck me dead. 

·       Teachers at all levels and in all subject areas must be skilled writers. They need to be advocates of- and facilitators for- good writing in their students. I’d even go so far as to say that any teacher who requires his or her written work to be corrected or checked for errors is definitely in the wrong job. The effects of modelling for students cannot be underestimated.

Two points from the attached article are worth putting the blow torch on. Firstly, Peter Knapp (referenced as ‘one of the country’s leading authorities on teaching writing’) claims that the process writing methodology that was employed in classrooms in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in grammar and spelling being jettisoned from the learning hubs. Now that’s absolute rubbish. Process writing lessons/ periods had positive and negative features but one of the stronger ones involved a dedicated time for student writing comprising of three or four sessions a week. And that was a very good development.

Secondly, Eva Gold (Executive Officer; N.S.W. English Teachers’ Association) suggests ‘The best way to improve writing is to write, write and write some more.’ Ms Gold, perhaps more than any other authority/ expert mentioned, calls out the very thing that might make a difference. Affirmative, it’s a challenge for the teacher in the classroom but if writing is to improve then students need time and space to practise the craft.

To conclude, I’m far from a writer but there are a few things about writing that I’ve learnt. When you scrawl down something for the punters you expose your arse and that can be daunting. It’s one of the challenges that all writers face. Now while a teacher wouldn’t couch it in those terms, students need to know that writing is difficult but that it’s always worth the effort.

Also, never assume that someone is good at writing or using precise grammar and spelling. They’ll routinely disappoint you. The best writers I know aren’t defined by age, self-acknowledgement or confidence.

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