Writ Large

It is a common contemporary complaint to bemoan the inability of almost anybody to write well. Over and over we hear: “Kids can’t write today”, “Teachers can’t write today”, “Grad students can’t write today”.
The fading of basic writing competency is blamed on a variety of bad influences. The disappearance of letter writing skills is attributed to the invention of the telephone and email. The disappearance of the essay is seen as a by-product of television broadcasting. The disappearance of nuanced language is laid at the feet of advertising copy and sound-bite news.
But the ability to write well has not actually disappeared from the human race. Our genetic hard-wired circuitry, after millions of years in development, is not likely to have changed appreciably in a few decades. And we still continue, as a species, to produce great writers.
So what has transpired to open up such a deep chasm between our native abilites to write and what happens when we put pen to paper or fingers to a keyboard? Maybe it’s not our capacity to write that has vanished, but rather, our love for the writing experience itself that has evaporated.
My own initiation into writing was highly pleasurable. My public school teachers went light on the red pen, and heavy on the appreciation of expressive and rigorous uses of language. We wrote in math class, we wrote in science class, we wrote in social studies class, we wrote in art class. All the current research confirms that this approach was exactly right – that comfort with writing comes from writing across the curriculum, and is facilitated by interested, responsive teachers who ask learners to explain their thinking in print, and who read their students’ writing. It also helps to have teachers that read, period.
But the greatest influences on my attitude toward writing were my parents, who not only read to me regularly, tenderly guiding me in receiving the written word, but who also taught me that writing is something that is created as well as received. Many families know how important it is to read with their children for pleasure, but I was lucky enough to have a family that also knew how important it is to write with their children for pleasure.
My father was a great storyteller. At bedtime he spun out extended serial narratives delineating the adventures of Mary Ellen Kafifalfafel and her encounters with the Parmigoolians (a clan of tiny people that lived in the blossoms of flowering trees). My sister and I suggested adjustments to the emerging plot, participating in the invention of an intimate epic. It was enthralling to witness, before our very ears, our ideas being incorporated on the spot into a spellbinding tale. And it was a powerful lesson in how stories unfold.
My mother would sit with me at the opalescent Formica kitchen table, with its chrome legs and its centerpiece of wax fruit in a plastic bowl, and ask me to read my writing aloud as I revised and edited. She asked such great leading questions:
“Do you want to use that word again, or would you prefer using a different one with a similar meaning?”
“That’s a great sentence. Where do you want it in the paragraph?”
“That’s a great paragraph. Is it strongest here or before the one above it?”
“Here you have the same idea expressed twice. Which version says what you want to say in just the way you want to say it?”
“Listen to how that sounds out loud. Is that how you want it to sound?”

She taught me to pay close attention to word choice, to shifts in tone, to the flow of ideas, to the unheard conceptual melody I was composing in my head while
I wrote. She turned my experience of writing from a task to be tolerated to an opportunity to be savored. I am forever grateful.
And although I avoid sound-bite news and advertising copy, I am thoroughly addicted to email, television, and my cell phone. But I love to write.

Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education
www.capeweb.org