For
quite some time, I have been teaching two graduate courses to help students in
education write more effectively, both for professional and general audiences.
Professional writing in education, and in the social sciences generally, is not
known for its eloquence, yet the issues written about – from child development
to the economics of higher education – are hugely important. So all of us
involved in education, from teachers and administrators to researchers to
school board members, need to get better at writing about what we know best.
I get asked about these
courses a lot, so I thought it might be useful to reprint here a (slightly
edited) section from a commentary I wrote about them for the journal College
English (January, 2010). In the article, I focus on students in the midst
of graduate study, but the general principles and the techniques could apply
easily to teachers, administrators, and members of school boards.
* * *
Education includes
areas of study as different as history and developmental biology and
psychology…as well as economics, linguistics, anthropology, political science,
sociology, statistics, and more.
It is not uncommon for a student to study several of these disciplines,
acquiring their vocabularies and modes of argument along the way, acquiring as
well the authority of disciplinary membership. But education is also intimately connected to broad public
concerns, and the majority of students in education very much want to affect
educational policy and practice.
How do they turn, and tune, their voices from the seminar room to the
public sphere? As they try to do
so, they find themselves smack in the middle of a whole set of questions about
communication: about writing, voice, audience, and the tension between the
language of specialization and the language of public discourse.
I hadn’t been in
UCLA’s ed school for very long before these tensions became a focus of my
teaching. Student after student in
child development, or language policy, or the study of higher education sat in
my office expressing a desire to make a difference in the world, to communicate
with the public about educational issues that mattered deeply to them. But they didn’t know how to do it, or,
to be more exact, worried that the specialized language of learning theory, or
critical social thought, or organizational behavior that they had worked so
hard to acquire both certified their authority in the academy and tongue-tied
them when it came to writing for non-specialists. Some also worried that these new languages – the syntax and
vocabulary, the conventions and stance – left no room for a personal mark, for
the deeply felt beliefs that brought them into education, for passion.
The
first course I developed helps students become more effective scholarly
writers. And while it certainly
addresses everything from conventions of citation to summarizing a body of
research literature, it also assists students in framing a tight argument and
questioning it, in thinking hard about audience, in appropriating stylistic
devices and considering the grace as well as informational content of their
sentences.
The
course is structured like a workshop, and each student begins by reading aloud
a piece of his or her writing, even if half of it is charts and statistical
tables. Because so many students
in education come out of the social or psychological sciences, they rarely, if
ever, had the opportunity to think about their writing as writing and not just a vehicle to hold information. I want them to hear their writing. I
urge them to find other scholarly and non-scholarly writers they like and read
them like a writer, noting and analyzing what it is they do that works – and
then incorporating those writers’ techniques into their own work. At the end of the quarter, I think that
the primary thing students acquire is a rhetorical sense of their writing;
style and audience are more on their minds. As one student put it so well: “The
course got me to think of my writing as strategic. Who am I writing to? Where
do I want to take them with my argument? How can I get them there?”
The second course
shares a good deal with the workshop on scholarly writing, but is designed to
help students in education write for the general public. The goal is to produce
two pieces of writing: the newspaper Op Ed piece and the magazine article.
Students can vary these for online media, but the purpose remains the same: to
draw on one’s studies and work in schools to write for a wide audience a
700-800 word opinion piece and a 1500-2500 word magazine article. Students are
also required to familiarize themselves with appropriate outlets and submit to
them.
To streamline our
discussion here, I’ll focus on the opinion piece, though my students and I go
through the same process and make some of the same discoveries in writing the
magazine article.
On the first day
of class, I distribute a variety of opinion pieces – and encourage students to
subsequently bring in ones they find that catch their fancy. We operate
inductively, reading the selections and looking for characteristics and
commonalities.
Students
immediately notice the brevity and conciseness of the opinion piece (versus the
longer, more elaborated writing of their disciplines). Claims and arguments are
made quickly and without heavy citation or marshalling of other research
relevant to the topic. Evidence is present in the opinion piece, of course, but
it will be one or two key statistics or examples or reports, or a telling and
crisp quotation from another expert. How, then, does one select a sample of
evidence that is vibrant yet still representative? Or, more challenging, how
does one deal with conflicting evidence within significant space constraints?
Students also
notice features of the Op Ed genre, particularly the “hook,” the linking of the
piece onto an event in the news. And, in some pieces, the “turn,” that point
where the writer, having summarized current policy or perception, turns the
tables and offers another way – the way the writer prefers – to think about the
issue at hand.
Opinion pieces are
written in all kinds of styles and voices – from polemical to didactic to
ironic – but students comment on the commonalities in language, the accessible
vocabulary, the lack of jargon (or the judicious use of it, always defined),
the frequent use of colloquial speech – always for rhetorical effect. Along
with diction, they note the syntax of sentences – often not as complicated as
they find in scholarly prose – and the short paragraphs (versus paragraphs that
in scholarly writing can go on for a page).
This attention to
style leads to experimentation: incorporating metaphor, varying sentence
length, the strategic shortening of paragraphs. It also contributes to a
heightened appreciation of revision and a commitment to it. “By the time I got
done with my piece,” one student said, “every sentence was changed. It does you
no good to hold onto your precious words.”
One thing I love
about teaching this course – or the one focused more on scholarly writing – is
how easily, readily big topics emerge, topics central to the kind of work the
students envision for themselves. We might be talking in class about the kind
of evidence to provide, and that discussion balloons to the issue of authority,
of demonstrating expertise. Or we’re down to the level of the sentence, mixing
long sentences with short ones, or even the effective use of the semi-colon or
the dash, and suddenly we’re talking about how someone wants to sound, to come
across to a reader.
This concern about
how one comes across has a lot to do with identity, a fundamental issue at this
stage of a graduate student’s development. What kind of work do I want to do?
How can I sound at least a little bit distinctive while appropriating the
linguistic conventions of my discipline? Who do I want to write for; how
narrowly or broadly will I think of my audience or audiences? Who am I as an
educator?
Another gratifying
effect of the course is the cross-over effect that always emerges: The students
begin to apply the lessons learned in this class on popular writing to their
academic prose. I encourage a kind of bilingualism, the continued development
of facility with both professional writing and writing for non-specialists.
But, as well, there is playback from the opinion piece and magazine article
onto the writing students do for their disciplines.
They learn, for
example, to present their argument quickly, tersely, without the scaffolds of
jargon, catchphrases, and a swarm of citations. This honing of language can
have a powerful effect on a writer’s conceptualization of the argument itself.
What exactly am I trying to say here?
What is the problem I’m trying to
solve? What is the fundamental logic of my study? Writing the opinion piece,
one student observed, “helped me think deeply about my topic. It’s so easy to
string a lot of fancy words together that look really important, but don’t
really have substance to them.”
I’ve been writing
about the crossover from the opinion piece to academic writing, but the
crossover works in both directions. Students gain a heightened sense of the
potential relevance of their work to issues of public concern.
The fostering of a
hybrid professional identity – the life lived both in specialization and in the
public sphere – is something I think we as a society need to nurture. The more
opinion is grounded on rich experience and deep study, the better the quality
of our public discourse about the issues that matter to us.
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