Part 1 of this series attempted to establish that effective writing is a valuable skill. Part 2 maintained that it is not being taught well – and sometimes not at all.  This final part suggests what needs to be done.

If we are to teach writing effectively in high school (and later), students need a firm foundation on which to build their skills.  Fortunately, most children are receptive to learning how to read and write.  As any observor of children knows, wordplay comes naturally to them; they love rhyming games, enjoy the novelty of arranging letters, and have an innate curiosity.  Reading and writing have not yet acquired any association with "work."

Building a foundation, however, requires some structural awareness.  Once more, we are fortunate in that Johnny has been, quite unconsciously, learning structure almost from the moment he began to talk.  First came the identifier Johnny (the subject), then the action (the verb), and then the recipient of the action (the object).  At age two, or perhaps earlier, Johnny was probably saying, "Johnny wants a cookie," thus having mastered a simple grammatical sentence.  It's ironic that, after twelve years in school, when Johnny is a college freshman, he appears not to know what a sentence is.  It's as if this sense of structure, acquired so easily when Johnny learned to talk, has been obliterated.

The probable reasons why this happens are complex, but we may start with a single principle.  Children learn language mostly by imitation, unaware of logical patterns and structure.  When they are still very young and learning the names of things and actions, this is sufficient, and some of the structural "rules" will take root subconsciously without further instruction.  For example, Johnny gets the idea that the name for the thing or person usually precedes the action without any awareness of such terms as noun or verb and subject or object.  This awareness is what some authors call "sentence sense," and most of us can tap into it with little instruction in formal grammar.  It is a foundation on which we can build, but it is not enough, by itself, to get us by when we are called upon to express new and more complex ideas.

When they are ready, which should be soon after vocabulary for simple concepts has developed, children need to be taught how language works.  They need to transcend imitation, to develop rudimentary insight into structure – how letters form syllables, how syllables combine to create words, how words work with one another to create sentences.  This is not to say that Johnny needs to be plunged immediately into the task of parsing sentences, but he can at least develop some awareness that language has structure.  At some point, preferably rather early in the process, reading must be something more than just recognizing words; the child needs to become conscious of how words are formed and how they work together to express thoughts and images.  Some basic instruction in word roots or derivation is appropriate at this time, too.

One of the most disastrous experiments in education was the see-and-say approach to teaching reading.  Under this approach, children were taught to sound out the beginnings of words and guess at the rest.  As a result, millions of children were not only poor spellers but, more importantly, had extreme difficulty comprehending much of what they read.

Another unproductive, and perhaps damaging, detour has been overemphasis upon "creativity."  This is not to say that creativity and imagination should be discouraged.  However, when children are taught that how they express themselves doesn't matter as long as they "get it out," they develop some serious misconceptions.  They learn that spelling doesn't matter as long as words are recognizable, that punctuation is optional, that rules of syntax have little or nothing to do with clarity of expression.  They acquire bad habits.  While it may be beneficial to teach students how to externalize ideas by "free writing," temporarily suspending concern with mechanics and grammar, we should not lead them to believe that this kind of writing is the final product.

Creativity involves innovation within the parameters of accepted structure, not haphazard disregard of structure entirely.  One must learn the rules before one can effectively break, or develop variations on, them – much as a musical composer must write the melody before creating variations on the tune.  Indeed, many similarities exist between learning to play a musical instrument and learning how to write.  First, we learn the scale; then we learn how to put the notes together into a harmonious tune.  Only much later, when the notes and the structure have become so automatic that we scarcely think about them consciously, do we venture into creative, personal variations.

As with music, another element is vital in writing – practice, practice, practice.  We learn about writing by writing.  Once again, this writing must be disciplined, structured writing, not uncontrolled, "creative" scribbling.  Although the latter is better than no writing at all, it does little to promote coherence and may, as has been noted, reinforce bad habits.  Presumably, we write to be read and understood; we should not expect our readers to "translate" scribbles into coherent, structured prose.

Possibly the main reason why Johnny cannot write is that he doesn't do enough structured writing.  Either he is misguided into believing that "creative" content is the end-all of writing, or he is instructed in other matters when he should be practicing structured writing.

At the risk of being heretical, I suggest that schools' insistence upon teaching Shakespeare is a prime example of misplaced priorities.  Although it is reasonable to want students to appreciate one of the masters of English literature, what sense does it make to require them to read Elizabethan prose when they cannot construct simple sentences in modern English?  Indeed, their comprehension of modern English may be so inadequate that understanding Elizabethan English is beyond them.  Shakespeare may be so difficult that reading his works produces the opposite of the desired result; students may emerge from reading and studying a Shakespearean play with the hope that, once they have escaped the clutches of their high school English teachers, they will never have to read another – or, for that matter, any so-called great literature.  The time would be better spent developing writing skills; painful as this may be to many high school students, they may at least perceive some practical value to what they are learning.

Writing skills need to be taught and reinforced in the educational process.  College students often report that they are taught grammar and structure in elementary school but that this instruction does not continue into middle and high school.  Unless the primary school foundation was unusually strong, they forget.  They also report that, even when writing is emphasized in English classes, it receives little or no emphasis in their other subjects.  When they do write papers in other subjects, these papers are rarely marked for grammar, clarity, or coherence.  Even egregious errors remain unnoted.  A student may, for example, get an "A" on a history exam as long as it "answers the question," though it abounds with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and sentence fragments (or run-ons). The instructor may have had to translate it into coherent English, but the exam is declared "excellent" anyway.

To implement this practice, which is sometimes called "writing across the disciplines," we must ensure that all teachers, regardless of their subjects, demonstrate an ability to write prose that is at least moderately correct and clear.  This idea may be met with hostility by the NEA, but no teacher should be certified to teach any subject until he or she has proven ability to write correct English.  If teachers themselves can write reasonably well, they will be almost constitutionally incapable of ignoring students' inability to write.  When virtually all teachers recognize that Johnny and Jane cannot write, when they accept that it is vital that their students have this skill, when they refuse to pass students who are scarcely literate – in short, when teachers face the facts (and stop blaming parents, television, and sunspots) – we may begin to have a society in which Johnny and Jane can write.