In unlearned to write a chapter in his book, right to learn, Donald Murray suggests that there are many rules and principles about writing that he learned in school, that he had to unlearn later in life in order to become a professional writer. These rules were absolute on questions he writes, but they were guaranteed to produce ineffective and raceless writing. He goes on to say, my teachers were well-intentioned, but they were readers who did not write themselves. Murray let's 16 such rules he had to unlearn but there are a few that I particularly wanted to focus on here. The first is his rule number 1. Know what you want to say before you say it. Writing is discovery. Think back to any of the freewriting that you've done, did anything come to you while you were writing that you hadn't planned to write before you started? I'll bet it did and if so, that's an example of writing as discovery of ideas coming to you while you are writing, coming up sometimes because your brain is making a connection to what you've just written and is adding to it. As Murray says, writers write and discover what they have to say as drafts. This idea connects to another rule to unlearn. Always outline first. The fiction writer Flannery O'Connor said I don't know what I think until I see what I've written down. Murray points out, you can't draw a map of a country you've never visited. Now that doesn't mean that all outlines should be banned. Often having a sense of how you want to proceed with the writing before you started can be helpful. But once you've outlined what you wanted to cover, don't be too rigid in following that outline. I mentioned in a previous video how when I was in school, we had to create an outline and then the essay we wrote was downgraded if a deviated at all from the outline. Such a practice prohibits discovery while writing. If you teach students to use outlines, aim for one that's more of a sketch, instead of a rigid plan that must be followed to a t. Another emerge rules to unlearn is that correct spelling, grammar, and mechanics are essential in the first draft. This goes back to Betty's Flowers idea of the madman. Just as we are discovering what we want to say when we write a first draft, we're also discovering what words we want to use to say what we want to say. In a first draft, if I'm unsure what word I want to use, I'll write down a half dozen words that might all convey the same meaning and then go back later to figure out which one is best. If I were to stop and forced myself to choose the right word at that moment, I would undoubtedly lose my train of thought and the river of ideas that was rushing to get out would dry up. Further, if I'm still not sure exactly what I want to say, how can I decide what exact word I need to use in order to say it? Correct spelling, grammar, and mechanics are essential, but not in the first draft. That's what later drafts are for. Keep your judge on the sidelines, until the time is right or him or her to step in and take over. The final rule to unlearn that I want to emphasize is, don't make mistakes. I know that as a writer I have learned a lot more from the mistakes I've made done I've learned from my successes. Murray writes, it is the failures that reveal the possibilities for good writing. We have to write badly to write well. Writers must be allowed to make mistakes. There must be allowed to follow ideas that might end up taking them down a dead-end Allie. As Murray rights, they must take risks, take chances. Lemont has a chapter in her book, Bird by Bird, entitled, and I'll use the more polite euphemism, crappy first drafts in which she embraces the idea that the first draft is simply the get it downdraft and will likely contain a lot of bad writing but we can't revise and improve writing until we've done writing. Feeling that they are allowed to make mistakes or even encouraged to is essential if students are to genuinely grow. This is one reason I cringe when I hear a teacher say I have to correct papers. Our job as writing teachers is not simply to correct our student's mistakes, is to help them learn and grow as writers. What do you need to unlearn? Can you think of rules or assumptions about writing and writers that you might have gathered somewhere along the way that you now might want to unlearn? I know that I used to believe that professional writers woke up with a big smile on their faces every morning because they loved writing so much and they had a whole day ahead of them when they could do nothing but write. Writing came easily to professional writers I believed, who never struggled, never grew frustrated. In fact, I convince myself for a time that I could never be a professional writer because sometimes I didn't want to write. Sometimes I avoided writing, and not only did I struggle when writing, but I discovered that often the writing that came most easily for me wasn't very good. You may also discover that there are rules about teaching that you'd like to unlearn. When I grew up believing, but later chose to unlearn, was that the teacher should always be the expert. In the eyes of the students, there should be nothing the teacher doesn't know or appears not to know. What pressure that put on me. I think it was all part of a larger assumption I grew up with that the teacher should be seen as perfect by students, never making mistakes. It's interesting to me that although I accepted early on that making mistakes could be a valuable way to learn as a writer, I still worked hard to avoid making mistakes as a teacher. But you can't avoid making some mistakes and trying so hard to avoid mistakes creates a barrier between you and your students. I not only became a better teacher after unlearning that role, but I became a better human being.
