Two short articles can help more than you think. The fact that they are short helps everyone by letting them know that the information they are about to be given has been condensed and will be straight to the point. They’ll also not be spending 20 minutes trying to understand every little word, but more likely be done in time to still be interested and not have drifted off into the “sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. Let me read that again” phase.
The first article, “Write Less, Say More: The Power of Brevity”, talks about how you don’t need to write a million word essay or sentence, or use big words, to seem smart. All you need is enough words to get your point across effectively. If your sentence can have words removed and still make sense, there is a good chance that you’re only using those words subliminally as fillers to make your writing seem longer to meet length requirements for your teacher. For example, the sentence “ I only went to the store to buy six or so cartons of eggs for my awesome grandma because she had wanted to ask me to for such a long time.” Can he changed to “I went to the store to buy six cartons of eggs because my grandma wanted me to.” This short article will help me by reminding my mind that not every word counts. Some can be changed or removed, some need to stay to make the idea work. Already I feel this article is etched into my brain, as if I always knew of the idea that I wrote in a style to please my teachers, but I needed something to tell me I didn’t have to anymore.
“Let’s Bury the 5-Paragraph Essay: Long Live Authentic Writing”, the second article, tells how the long taught strategy of organizing ideas by paragraph and how they must each be structured by topic sentence, point and example, and conclusion, is not authentic writing. Authentic means of undisputed origin. I’m sure we know that it is disputed, where most of our essay ideas and layouts came from. Teachers teach everyone how to write the same way, but to be authentic we must now learn to write in our own way. Writing is an art form, there is no right or wrong way to do it, it is always going to be writing. This idea will help me start to write in a way that I can agree with and everyone else can get meaning from.
If we all write the same, how can we learn from not only the teacher, who must write this way to be able to teach us, but from each other. Our peers can be a source of learning on a level of connection that no adult can reach.
AlwaysTimHortons 