I love the audio and video courses I get from the Teaching Company; they distract me when I’m exercising and often challenge my preconceptions about history, science and music. But my first one on writing, Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft, also brought up some decades-old and nearly-forgotten anger and resentment.
Turns out there aren’t “rock solid” rules about writing sentences, and people (teachers) who tell you differently aren’t doing you any favors. At the least, they could say that there are many ways to write effectively and engagingly but here are some good rules to follow (though even that is debatable). There are worlds beyond chap-book grammar and the many acronym styles (CMS, AP, MLA). And beyond the five-paragraph essay is the universe.
Can you believe that a guy in Scotland in the 1860s made up the rules for paragraphing, and without thinking about it we parrot him to this day? Rules like, never be anything but clear and direct, keep to one idea in a paragraph, use a “topic” sentence, etc. As if every idea can be boiled down to one statement and built step-by-step in one perfect way. Turns out that if you actually ask people to paragraph, say, a Supreme Court decision, they all do it differently–and few do it the way the court writers did (and the same person divided it differently on different days). But who needs empirical evidence when you can more easily parrot the received wisdom?
Writing isn’t science (don’t get me started), but as a person whose sentences often do not fit the Correct Mold and whose work has on occasion been mangled on its way into print, sometimes I just want to scream, “It’s not wrong if it works! Read it as it lays!”
The teacher on the video, Brooks Landon (highly recommended, can’t dance, loves music), said he learned about generative grammars and such as a grad student in the ’70s, but “building great sentences” fell out of favor later. By the time I hit college, all I got was strict structure in writing class and fierce deconstruction in lit-crit classes. So I came out of school with only the skills I brought in — plus the idea that all writing can be broken down into tiny bits that, really, seriously, down deep, don’t mean anything. Wonder why I didn’t write for pleasure for the next decade?
Luckily, romance novels, graphic novels and the steady stream of classics I read (some in French!) snapped me back into joy. I love writing, sentences, paragraphs, stories and sagas, whatever. It’s sad I had to be 40 before I learned about them, but thank goodness I have. I’m thinking there won’t be any of my high-school or college teacher’s names on my first acknowledgements page.
This all dredges up days long ago. In elementary school, I was part of the horde that was taught “new math.” Handouts about sets and subsets were fresh and fun, sure, but when I got to middle school (in yet another new town), I discovered I didn’t understand much math at all. Like, none. A month or two of scary-red test papers later, I had taught myself the basic stuff and was catching up with the rest of my algebra class. It turns out I’m good in math (high-school math team, hello), but what if I hadn’t been? What about all my friends at the other school? Did they catch up? Thanks, teach, for wrecking us. Makes me grind my teeth.
Later in high school, I remember comforting a friend who was moaning about how she didn’t know grammar, obviously, because she hadn’t scored well on the PSAT. I said pah, SAT style is just a pattern of thinking (rigid structure, serial comma, use the word’s first definition). My teacher overheard me and stomped over to our desks, saying No, there is only one grammar. Luckily, I already knew she was wrong. Unluckily, she made my friend even more despondent.
Turns out even now, I had more writing “instruction” to unlearn. And maybe still more? Guess I’d better look out for more Teaching Company courses.
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