In Defense of Writing: An Attack on Writing

“Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.” –Mark Twain

I admit, I’ve used this as a mantra throughout my school days (which are soon coming to an end) as an excuse to blow off classes as impractical and useless. I’ve asked my share of teachers “When will I ever need this?” in response to their lessons. In short, I was a typical student: mistrustful of the skills I was being taught in the classroom and confident that all I needed to know would be learned outside the oppressive walls of the school.

This experience was never more amplified for me, and I imagine many—if not most—of my peers, in English class. What’s the point of book reports? Why in the world would I ever annotate a book? When will I ever have to write an essay analyzing a 19^th century poem in 40 minutes or less?

I felt smug as only a teenager can when I asked these questions, sure that there was nothing in the world of literary analysis that would truly be applicable to my life. It turns out, I was wrong. Of course, I use it in college, which is all well and good except that it’s still academic in nature. But I’m willing to admit that I’m grateful for those lessons breaking down stories, essays and the like. It makes me a better citizen in that I’m able to effectively wade through the rhetoric of political campaigns and find the bits of truth among all the flowery speech. I’ve become much more of a cinephile because I’m able to find the little things in the visuals and dialogue that would otherwise go unnoticed.

However, not all of my issues with English class have been resolved. Book annotations, for one, I still don’t understand. I think that some people find it useful when going through textbooks in school, and of course people are going to mark up things such as legal documents in their professional lives. But that’s not what we’re going through as students; we’re forced to annotate novels. I just don’t get it. Why am I going to parse though a piece of literature? I typically read such works in order to derive some sort of enjoyment, and that feeling will not be enhanced by me scribbling some neon yellow on the pages and filling the margins with notes like, “oh hey a simile.”

I think that the bigger issue than highlighting books, though, is the problem of writing. Not that writing is bad or useless. Can you imagine the irony of this essay if I thought it was? Rather, I find that the style of writing used in school is counterproductive to getting students to find the joys of the written word.

All throughout the education system, from elementary book reports to college research papers, writing is reduced almost exclusively to an academic nature. We are taught how to write an analytical piece for some exam, or a research paper that could be published in an academic journal. Even journalistic works are supposed to be just the facts, without personal opinion or bias. There’s nothing wrong with these approaches, they are all needed and serve a purpose. The problem lies within the fact that, outside of a class assignment here and there or (if you’re lucky) a creative writing class, those are just about the only exposure to “writing” that you have.

Is it any surprise, then, that so many students have such distaste for writing? Their only experience is in these joyless, personality-deprived assignments that achieve little outside of the academic world. Teachers hound students to fill their papers with “voice,” meaning the individual style that separates their work from their neighbor’s. But what is the voice without the original thoughts and ideas that it carries from its producer’s mind? Save for perhaps the upper-level thesis paper, the student is simply summarizing the original author’s thoughts and methods instead of advancing their own.

In the same classes, these students are reading great writers who push their own ideologies through their tales and essays. The great literary works are put in front of them, from epic novels like The Once and Future King to satirical essays such as Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” They’re given these examples of great writing and are then told, “An introductory paragraph. State your thesis. 3+ body paragraphs. Topic sentences for each. Restate the topics at the end. A conclusion. Restate your thesis.”

The result is that children are turned off by the notion of writing because they have an extremely narrow view on the meaning of that word. Why would a kid think to be the next Mark Twain when the only time he connects Twain and writing is while he’s slaving over his Huck Finn book report? The mindset implanted is that the words you read are meant to be analyzed, not emulated. The notion that one can do both is rarely, if ever, presented in the classroom.

There are precious few opportunities for students to take inspiration from these artists and create something of their own. At least in my own experience, this almost exclusively happened during the poetry portion of the curriculum. In most, if not all, classes that we studied and parsed pieces of poetry, we were also given the opportunity to create our own works. Admittedly, most of the poetry seemed odd or foreign to a good number of us, especially the male portion of my classes, but we all took full advantage of the free range of subject afforded to us for these projects. Pokémon, sports, relationships and even commentaries on the absurdness of poetry (very meta) were just some of the topics brought up using our poetic license.

I’ll be the first to admit that these poetry lessons were never my favorite, but I chalk that up to my general lack of exposure to and understanding of poetry. But classic narrative prose was something that I was extremely familiar with as a voracious consumer of books from a young age. I can only recall a few instances in nearly 17 years of schooling that allowed me free reign to tell these stories in writing, and I loved each one.

The earliest example I can remember came in the 4^th grade. Our assignment was to simply write a short story that we made into a book (read: we stapled the pages in between a piece of folded construction paper). Over the course of my elementary years I had created a group of anthropomorphic school supplies, ostensibly a league of superheroes. I was prepared to create an entire back-story of how their leader, Pencil Pete, was used by Noah Webster to write the first American dictionary and their subsequent adventures.

Sadly, this idea became too large an undertaking for someone just getting to double-digits in years up against a deadline. Instead, I ripped off a detective story in the style of the Encyclopedia Brown series about a feud between former Houston Astros catcher Tony Eusebio and then-Texas Rangers catcher Ivan Rodriguez. Even still, it was a project that I thoroughly enjoyed completing and one that obviously stuck with me.

It wasn’t until freshman year of high school that I got another assignment that really stuck with me like that. We were reading Homer’s Odyssey, and we were challenged to write our own mythological adventure story. The teacher only asked for a short story, probably two pages in length. As I started on mine, I found that I couldn’t stop writing this epic tale in my notebook. I had so many ideas that I wanted to include. Giants, dragons, fair maidens needing to be rescued. I had about 12 pages when it was all said and done, and it remains one of the longest pieces I’ve ever written, academic or otherwise. It’s hardly a literary masterpiece, but for once a writing assignment wasn’t a chore to complete.

Racking my brain for examples of writing assignments I’ve completed in my school years, the only examples I can come up with not done in the past year are the ones that I got to completely make up and tell in my own way, like the ones mentioned, or the story of a Norwegian boy getting a horse from the king for his birthday (7^th grade, written during standardized test practice), or a dissertation on why I felt school to utterly useless to myself (10^th grade, written in lieu of a book chapter analysis). I can scarcely recall any of the topics of the mountains of academic papers I wrote over the same time period, much less what I had to say in them.

Despite these instances of creative writing, I carried a strong distaste of writing in general for many, many years. Towards the end of high school, I started to hone in what I thought I wanted to do with my life. Sports broadcast journalism was what I had settled on. Radio or television, it didn’t really matter. Anything but print. I couldn’t see myself writing as a profession and enjoying it. Writing had been a complete nuisance throughout school, and as good as my grades may have been on those papers and essays, they were anything but fun to produce.

Fast forward to the present day, my final semester in college, about to step into the real world and ready to get a job. It’s only just now that I’m breaking down my perceptions that all writing is a complete pain. If you can write freely about something that you enjoy, I’m finding out, writing becomes an easy outlet for your ideas and opinions. It may sound obvious when put like that, but it took me this long to truly separate in my mind the different types of writing. It’s only just now that I’m coming to terms with the fact that I very well could get a job where one of my primary functions would be writing.

It took all those years and several unique experiences for me to finally come to these realizations, and I worry that so many others in my same position may never find these things out. I suppose it’s possible that I’m a completely isolated subject and those who like writing always have and those who dislike it never will in any form. But the human experience suggests that it’s highly likely that there are more people out there that share a common sentiment with me on how writing was presented to them.

Some might argue that students who are interested in exploring these facets of writing will naturally do so outside of the classroom in their own free time. Of course there will be some outstanding students and writers who realize these things on their own accord, but it seems that the majority of students see writing as an annoyance instead of something that can be immensely pleasurable and impactful. Shouldn’t the goal be to show every child the worlds that writing can open?

The word “creative” has been tossed around in this essay and is often attached to this form of writing. The word connotes an original and imaginative thought or expression that is usually reserved for a special few people. They are the creative ones. But when you get to the root of it, creative just means having the power to create. That’s something that every human has the capability of. We create our own thoughts and no matter how influenced they are by someone else or something else, they are still entirely our own creation. Think about a child and their satisfaction and delight whenever they make anything, from a Play-Dough dog to a picture of their family. It’s the power of creation, making something of your own.

It can be the exact same with writing. Show students they don’t just have to critically study literary works, but that they can create their own. How much more exciting does writing become when it turns out to be your own creation, your own original production? Teachers can find the voice in their students’ writings when it becomes personal, and it becomes so much easier make better writers out of them when they’re willing to write.

Let’s make writing fun!