Hey, Skinny Latte Authors, Where Will Future Writers Come From?

If we were to survey the skinny-latte authors who style themselves as creative types and experts on writing spewing forth their brilliance and ask them where future writers will come from, they would no doubt wave one of their artful hands and say we should have lots of creative writing in schools.

Vapid people always foist whatever they want onto schools.

I say as a career English teacher: Keep your hands off the classroom. The last thing we need is more people forcing their non-expert advice on teachers who are in fact the experts.

Every time the public's butt crack itches, they "should" all over schools. They say: "Schools should..."

Ironically, one of the most damaging forces impeding writing excellence is the National Writing Project. In the jai guru deva om, smoke induced stupor of the 1970s the Bay Area Writing Project, at UC Berkeley, promoted the notion that the process of writing was more important than the product. The feel-good moment spread to other California universities spawning the California Writing Project, then across the nation to become the National Writing Project.

While the message of there being a process that leads to a product is big fat DUHH even to trained monkeys, the National Writing Project's insistence that teachers bog down in the process (incessant brainstorming, protracted sharing out, drafting and drafting and drafting, etc.) produced a generation of writers who felt really good about the garbage they were writing. Thankfully, teachers have pretty much stopped listening to the NWP.

The result of this drunken interlude with the NWP is that we have some eAuthors who were students in classrooms during that movement who are completely comfortable with the creativity of their writing even if their attention to grammar is atrocious. Politely, I have had to tell some eAuthors I would not be reviewing their books because I would have to be honest about the quality of the writing.

Writing is not as simple as sit down, shut up, and write, the product DOES matter. A person can NaNoWriMo or write X number of words per day or month until Hell freezes over, but THAT is not good writing. Being able to spew fifty thousand words in a month is hardly remarkable.

Quality matters. There ARE standards.

When I teach writing, I do in fact use process, but state standards demand the product measure up. People who espouse writing errors as style (e.g. coordinating conjunctions starting sentences, contractions in narration, and so on) will never seek to do it correctly because that would require effort. It is much easier to call one's cult of low standards a virtue and call anyone who points it out, judgmental.

Judging is NOT a bad thing. The people who seek to be "non-judgmental" really want a culture of lowest common denominator, rock bottom expectations, and not to have to confront their own laziness.

Of course, they are the first to demand schools deliver excellence. Hypocrites!

The second damaging movement in American schools was the idiocy of the Jane Schaffer Method.

More than a decade ago, schools faced the imperative of having to raise literacy scores. They grabbed onto and spent a fortune on the products of a charlatan named Jane Schaffer who focused her snake-oil writing program 100% on the product and hailed deadly formulaic writing as the pinnacle of excellence. Schools bought in because the teachers--who grew up under the regime of the National Writing Project's pissing on the curriculum--had no idea how to teach correct writing! The problem with Jane Schaffer's so-called method is that her formulaic garbage produced a legion of writers needing remediation when they went to college.

I have to wonder if the sheer number of writers who think they have to include a prologue when they write a novel is as a result of thinking a formulaic approach to writing connotes excellence.

Ms. Schaffer passed away, so she will never have to shoulder the shame for what she did to a generation of writers.

These days teachers are asserting their voices as the classroom experts. They are quite conversant in the standards, have researched and implemented instructional techniques to drive acquisition, and participate in Professional Learning Communities where hard data about student acquisition results in teaching direction. This approach where excellence is expected, and students driven toward it, will ultimately produce better writers so long as the skinny-latte authors can stop pretending they are writing experts.

With schools seeking an 800 or higher Academic Performance Index, the answer to the question I posed is the classroom.