All Writing is Writing 101

Whenever I think about student writing, I recall a girl who was in the writing program at Sylvan a couple years back. This young woman, either a 10th or 11th-grader, was also in some kind of "advanced composition" class at her high school. At the center we generally teach writing within the confines of the standard five-paragraph essay. What I remember so clearly about this one particular student is how she proclaimed, almost in a condescending tone I thought at the time, that she and her advanced composition class were "way beyond that." What I remember with equal clarity is that she was not a very good writer. Her class assignments, a couple of which I saw and found very confusing, may have been convoluted and may have required all manner of rhetorical devices and organizational forms, but this girl could not put together a concise, natural-sounding sentence. My experiences with her reinforced my strong belief that there is no such beast as "advanced writing;" there is only writing. And the more we can simplify the teaching of it, the better our writing instruction will be.

Writing hasn't changed since its inception. We write, as we always have, to instruct, differentiate, explain, argue, persuade, describe, inform, entertain, clarify, analyze, shock, make uncomfortable, or any one of several other verbs I could list. The general framework we use is similarly unchanged: we introduce our subject, put it in some kind of perspective, state our opinion, support it with details or evidence, and tie it together in some kind of conclusion. And, hopefully, we accomplish all of this with precise, sophisticated diction, appropriate tone, distinctive voice, originality, and maybe a bit of panache. There are many ways, five-paragraph essay and otherwise, in which we can organize our thoughts and our words to meet these criteria. Writing can be called advanced only to the extent that it impacts the reader in a new or significant way.