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Jan 8, 2010, 10:14am

Fantasy Writers Guild :: How to… :: How to... :: How to Teach Others to Write.

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Topic: How to Teach Others to Write. (Read 151 times)

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How to Teach Others to Write.
« Thread Started on Sept 10, 2007, 10:30pm »

I did not write this, A friend of mine did, but it made a few good points:

How To Teach Others To Write

Now listen closely, those of you with the urge to teach others the art of writing (or those of you who want something more from my How To Write Tutorial). I will now divulge the few key things you absolutely must do when teaching others how to write.

+ Never, ever, tell them what your personal style is, or give examples in your style.
+ Never tell them they can't do something.
+ In the case of Essay Writing, tell them that "Essay" comes from the French verb "Essayer" which means "To Try", so they should try to write one. If we didn't enforce such useless B.S. like a funnel method in our Essays maybe they'd be worth reading one day.
+ Because the people you're teaching don't know how to write (or else they wouldn't be reading/hearing your lesson), always stress the importance of reading. Tell them to read everything they can (good and bad), and from reading they will gain a grand array of words, style, and ability to spell things correctly.

I see all sorts of 'ideas' on how to write better over the web. 'Ideas,' 'tricks,' 'proper things,' and more. The most uncommon suggestion I see, which is really a shame, is that we as writers should never use the "to be" verb if it's possible to avoid (is, was, were, being, be, become, are). I think this is the best tip anyone trying to teach proper grammar can give, but I think it should be limited to just that. Proper grammar. Tell them they shouldn't use sentence fragments, the "to be" verb, and run on sentences, but keep in mind that you're telling them how to write boring essays and luring their mind into the most restricted area that is the bounds of grammar. (If you really want to stress grammar, tell them to learn French instead of English.)

You'll notice how many times I used the "to be" verb in the above 'paragraph', and I've used several fragments already. That's because it's how I naturally write, and I'm not about to take more time out of my life to proofread everything before I post it.

Your English class doesn't teach you how to write, it teaches you proper grammar so that you can format a proper essay. Don't be like the English class when teaching others; they get enough of that already. Teach them open-mindedness and creativity, teach them to absorb literature--not essays.

Look at the fantasy books by Terry Brooks. He's a bright guy, yet he uses the "to be" verb quite often, as do most authors. The "to be" verb isn't bad, and while if it's used in every sentence you speak or write then you may need to check your laziness radar, or think before you speak.

I'd personally rather see more Terry Brookses and other authors as opposed to more high school and college grads thinking that perfect grammar is everything. I'd like to see English teachers assigning projects such as "Write me a 30 page short story about a subject of your choice" instead of "Write an essay to try and explain Emily thingyinson's 12 or so line poem 'Hope is the thing with feathers.'" The world can live without essays, I think. If you want to try to explain something, try to yourself or a few other people before finally coming up with a complicated proof or man page about it. That way you can save the complicated crap for where it's needed: in a manual.

"Never use the words 'I think.'" Wrong. Unless you're quoting something, the phrase "I think" is completely acceptable because it's true. Call it unnecessary if you must, but a lot of things in all languages are unnecessary that we use every day. Most of them aren't even boycotted against (yet) like 'I think.' I think that it's good to exercise the word "I", for without we would be a collective incapable of individual thought.

"Never use contractions." Wrong again, unless it's a formal essay. Extremely proper grammar is more of a dressing rather than the salade, and anyone trying to teach writing should know that. It's nice to know what a contraction is, or a gerund is, but it's not nice to forbid the use of anything for whatever formal boundary has been set.

Brobdingnagian expressions and words often impose a sense of intelligence. However, small and simple words usually get the job done. Rather than looking for the intelligence in either using a thesaurus or just knowing the big words, one should look at the ulterior intelligence behind the small words. Ideas are more important than language, for language is just the transportation. Would you consider cars more important than the people inside them?

If you are writing a formal paper for school, never use the informal 'you', and use the formal 'one.' 'One' sounds smarter anyway. If you are writing a formal paper, toss out the right side of your brain for a while and abide by the most strict grammar you know of. Frankly, I think the grammar necessary for a decent essay is covered thoroughly in school, so non school teachers shouldn't be teaching the same stuff again. My English 10 Honors class couldn't even grasp what a dependant clause was, let alone distinguish "who" from "whom." (Even though that our Summer Packet was full of such grammar.) Does that mean that they were stupid, or does that mean that they were resisting the unnecessary complications of knowing what the little area of a sentence "because the farmer wept" was in grammar terms?

Foreigners learning the language should speak, write, and read. But writing should be the least of their initial worries (unless the language is full of accents and silent letters that need to be addressed in the mind). Take learning a Programming Language, for example. If it's something like Python, you're going to learn a lot of the syntax (in fact, you're going to learn most all of the significant syntax before you even write anything significant). You will write a little bit, of course, merely to get the idea in your head, but you're not going to go write a killer game in PyGame the next day. Heck, you won't even use all of the syntax. (I've used Python for a pretty long while now and I've yet to make use of lambda.) So, after you get the basic syntax down, you go off into the world of code and see what other people have written. This will affect your own coding style, as well, for you may see something that you would do differently but this new way makes more sense. This should be the case with spoken language: learn the syntax, or basic grammar, speak and write a little bit to put it in your head, read it, hear it, speak more, and eventually write. Think about the process of your native language: you talked long before you knew how to read or write, and talking is just using the basic syntax you have gained from hearing.

I'll close with a quote from Ernest Hemingway that I like:
"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."

~Jach

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