Transforming Substance Into Significance, Part 2: Authenticity

Effective instructional writing programs possess authenticity; they actually teach students how to write well. This may seem like an obvious characteristic, one that every program possesses, but experts describe our current instructional writing programs as having little relationship to actual writing. Students fill instructional time completing exercises, usually identifying parts of speech in preprinted sentences, correcting capitalization and punctuation in preprinted sentences, or identifying the correct word form (e.g., have or has?) in preprinted sentences. Despite all this busyness, research indicates that almost no, if any, relationship exists between such practice and actual writing achievement. With such programs, you could train world-champion sentence diagrammers but never produce a student with exemplary writing skills. The programs lack authenticity because they fail to actually teach writing.

To actually teach writing, an instructional program must contain and teach quality writing’s characteristics. This emphasis can be assessed, in part, by examining the program’s research-base. What sources and experts did the developers consult in constructing the program? Note an important distinction: by research-base I do not mean evidence that the program improved standardized test scores. Such evidence can be informative, but the program is unlikely to produce writers if actual writing experts were not consulted in the program’s development. Again, an important clarification is needed: by writing experts, I mean individuals who are professional writers, or better yet, editors.

Why does this matter? Wouldn’t individuals with expertise in teaching language arts provide the necessary research-base? No. Instructional experts definitely play a critical role in a program’s development, but if they have never written or edited for publication—something beyond an article here and there—they may lack the knowledge needed to establish the necessary content—the concepts and skills that will develop student writing capacity. Let me illustrate by contrasting how an educational expert and professional writers/editors view writing. I own a textbook used widely in college level courses that train education majors in how to teach the language arts. In the opening chapter, a well-known educator argues that students learn to write by writing. She continues this argument, advocating daily journal writing and weekly story writing for elementary students. For her, frequent writing means engaging students in writing many first drafts with little or no follow-up. Teachers who follow her advice and apply her methods will have students generate large amounts of drafting but little actual writing.

In contrast, when professional editors write about writing, they typically devote one chapter to drafting and nine or more chapters to revising. Writing involves careful crafting of the initial draft. Real writing only begins with drafting, but students in many classrooms spend 90% of the instructional time devoted to writing doing 10% of writing’s actual work! Why? Because the instructional program lacks authenticity; it fails to teach students how to successfully revise their first drafts—it fails to teach students to transform substance into significance.

The research-base matters! Whom did the program’s authors consult to establish the program’s content? If they failed to include insights from professional writers and editors in their initial research, the program likely lacks authenticity. It likely teaches something other than writing.

Coming next: authenticity evidenced in genre variety and purposes for writing