For years I taught secondary students who had difficulty
reading on level. It killed me that they felt less of themselves because of
their inability. I would test them at the beginning of the year, share my
diagnosis with them, and promised them they would improve by the end of the
year if they trusted me and gave me their all.
Halfway through my teaching career (all thirty-seven years of
it), I added writing teacher to my résumé. Besides a reading inventory, I required a
writing sample from the students. After
careful study, I made lesson plans accordingly. Once I studied the power of
writing, I realized writing ability was the real test of literacy. Sure the students had to improve their
reading, but it was in their ability to write well that demonstrated success.
Consider this: When
learning a new language, a human being first observes (watches and listens),
then he/she attempts to speak or repeat the sounds. It is then the learner associates or matches
the sounds to their written symbol, thus they “read.” They continue to listen,
read, and become more familiar or attempt to create oral sentences. It is when they write a sentence that they
demonstrate syntactical sophistication. They are able to take a concept and capture
it onto a portable product separate from themselves that can be handed to
someone else and when read miles from them or years from now will communicate
his or her intentional thoughts.
Let’s pretend I want to learn to play bridge (a totally
foreign “language” to someone like me whose card sophistication maxes out at
Uno). I watch and observe my husband and his family play a couple of
games. I try my hand at it (no pun
intended), but fail miserably. My family
shows me how to correct my skill (or lack of it) and I try again. I improve with each attempt until I get where
I can read the game better and create my own plays. It is when I can hold my
own against my husband and his parents (card sharks!) that I have learned the “language.”
But that is where the comparison ends. There is nothing else
in this world similar to the skill of writing. Only humans write. We have this
innate and desperate need to write.
Starting from the cave paintings (and before that probably
drawings in the dirt or sand), humans have had a need to communicate with
pictures or words or both. We have “writings” that are thousands of years old –
bones, rocks, pictographs, cuneiforms, tablets, bamboo slats, knotted cords,
stone slabs, leather and paper scripts. From
these we developed the alphabets and other writing forms we use today.
We are the only creatures on earth who can communicate with
writing. We have studied how almost all
living things on earth communicate with each other, but none can create text
like we can. It demonstrates our intelligence.
To write well, the author must know what he wants to say and
know how to say it best, but it is not as easy as it sounds. It demonstrates
the highest of his intelligence – he must envision what he wants to
communicate, choose the morphology, order its syntactical structure, and decide
on the appropriate cultural nuance(s). By reading someone’s writing, the reader
can ascertain the author’s facility with vocabulary, ability to decide on the
length of sentence necessary to capture tone and mood, and his/her
sophistication to communicate appropriately toward his/her audience.
(PS: This is applicable to any form or genre of writing, be it
fiction or non-fiction, poetry or lyrics.)
I kept my promise to the students in my class; they improved
their reading skills, but it was in their writing that I was able to ascertain true
success.
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