Welcome. As teachers, we want to help students to produce good writing. But what makes writing good? seventy five years ago, most people believed that the best and smartest writers use big words strung together in long, elaborate sentences. Through these big words and elaborate sentences, you demonstrated your intelligence and seriousness of purpose. If readers didn't understand what you were saying, it was the fault of the readers who just must not be smart enough. Theorists studying the average sentence length of a given piece of writing, concluded that a writer using sentences averaging 32.5 words per sentence was a smarter, more educated writer than one who sentences average 12.5 words. In essence, the belief was length equals Intelligence, or I guess in a sense, size matters. As a joke, I once created a formula for writers who wanted to be considered intelligent by people who believed in this definition of good writing. First, take a simple noun, such as dog. Now, make it into an adjective, doggish. Keeping that same form, make it an adverb, doggishly. Keeping that form, make it back into a noun, doggishliocity. Then to make it sound more erudite, move the accent to the second syllable, do-ggish-li-ocity, which means the state of being like a dog, sounds impressive. Not anymore in enlarged part, that's thanks to the writing process movement. Movement began in the 1960s, first in England and then in the US with the Dartmouth Anglo-American conference on the teaching and learning of English in 1966, which quickly became known as the Dartmouth seminar. There, scholar teachers from the US and Great Britain tried to determine the methods by which writings should be taught. Among other actions that research led to the founding of the National Writing Project in 1974 at the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. NWP developed a university-based program for K through 16 teachers of writing. The fire for reform and writing instruction was already burning, but it got a healthy dose of gasoline from the 1975 Newsweek article, ''Why Johnny Can't write?'' Which begins and bear with me, I'll read through this quickly. If your children are attending college, the chances are, when they graduate, they will be unable to write ordinary expository English with any real degree of structure and lucidity. If they are in high-school and planning to attend college, the chances are less than ever that they will be able to write English at the minimal college level when they get there. If they're not planning to attend college, their skills in writing English may not even qualify them for secretarial or clerical work. The US educational system is spawning a generation of semi-literates. Some of the leading theorists during this time included people you've already encountered in this course, such as Peter Elbow and Donald Murray, and people who 's work we'll consider in later courses. Educators such as Donald graves, Nancie Atwell and Lucy Calkins. Some of the key conclusions that came from the work of these and other educators were professional or real writers approach writing as a process. Often not knowing when they start, what they want to say or even what formed their writing will take. While all writers processes might be unique in certain ways, there are general patterns that all writers follow in some way as they work toward producing a product. Writers focus less on the product that on this process. Trusting that the process will lead them to a successful product at the end of the process. The best way to teach students to write is to study these processes used by real writers. An analogy that I use in talking about this sometimes is that of a baseball pitcher. A pitcher may want to strike the batter out, may feel that they need to strike the batter out. But if the pitcher tries to achieve that product, to get the batter to strike out. The chances are less likely that the pitcher will succeed, than if he simply focuses on his own process. Getting his arm at the right angle, getting his lower body in sync, going through the motion that he goes through every time he throws the ball. Focusing on that process of delivering the pitch gives him a much better chance to achieve the product, the strike-out that he's after. These ideas led to the movement known as process writing, which took off as the main approach to teaching writing through the 1980s, '90s and into the 21st century. They also lead to a re-evaluation of what makes good writing. For those of you who would like to know more about the history of teaching writing over the past half century, as well as take a look into what changes the teaching of writing might undergo in the years ahead, I posted two optional readings at the end of this module, taking stock the writing process movement in the '90s and writing in the 21st century. What most people believe are the characteristics of good writing today. Good writing is clear, clarity is a key, and clarity is not the same as simplicity. It can be very complex. But even so, the complexity is clearly stated. In fact, the more complex the idea, the more important that clarity is. Good writing has relevant content and identifiable purpose. It says something worth saying for a reason. Good writing speaks to its target audience in a way that the audience will understand. Good writing is focused and flows. Good writing effectively anticipates and meets the rhetorical situation, genre, form, etc. Good writing demonstrates effective and appropriate style and voice. Instead of writing, that fellow exhibits a high degree of doggishliocity. Today we write, he's acting like a dog.
