I can pretty well hear the sides lining up. What Andy Selsberg does in his college freshman composition class is either a useful means of teaching youngsters how to focus in on a topic and make every word count, or it’s the latest means of pandering to the degenerate pop culture.
With all due respect to those in the latter camp, I’m in the former one. All the flash fiction stories and haiku here at Catsignal probably gave you a heads-up on that.
In some ways, this hearkens back to our “See Spot run” days. I don’t know what happens to break people of writing in simple, direct sentences like that, but it should be found and shot into space. Selsberg is reminding his students how to effectively communicate. Put everything you need in a sentence, but no more, and make it clear. This has immediate real-world value in addition to being a building block to longer and greater writing efforts.
I’d like to see this brought back into the lower grades, though. Just as we must crawl before we walk and walk before we run, Selsberg’s exercises can teach the next generation how to say as much as they can in as little space as possible. That can be quite a difficult task to master.
Obviously, once students get this under their belts, then follows longer-form writing exercises and assignments. Some things take more than two lines to properly express, and there is great literature that cannot be read in a minute or less. Still, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is merely 267 words long, and it has come to be regarded as one of the great masterpieces in the English language.
I’m still working on this. It sounds good at a glance, and at a glance it also sounds oversimplified. My first reaction is that this teaching method lowers the standard ridiculously, yet I also acknowledge that when I write an email, or a comment like this one, I revise quite a bit before hitting the “send” button. Even in the context of short text messages, excellence can be attempted and achieved, or we wouldn’t have lyric poetry. Developing writing habits and traits that make powerful use of short spaces is not wasted effort. It will pay off in longer writings as well.
I’m glad the author of that linked article admitted that there are skills in longer composition that are worth teaching. Imagine trying to put the logic and persuasive rhetoric of John Stuart Mill’s “The Subjection of Women” into a text message, or a mere paragraph:
Well, maybe that’s not so bad, but I had to leave out a lot of really persuasive illustrations and this summary sounds silly next to the original. Maybe others could do better, but I was really trying to be fair. Mill’s is a many-staged reasoned argument that demands sustained attention and I think it should be that way. Some things are worth spending time with.
While we’re meeting students on their own ground and demanding excellence there, we also have to remind them that they won’t be doing all their language work in 250-character tweets. Sometimes bumper-sticker mentality is the problem, not the solution.
(I made a good 20 or 30 edits to this before I sent it. –gb)
And now it occurs to me that I’m more persuaded than I sounded in that first comment. I can easily imagine a very fruitful first-semester comp class that taught students the responsible and effective use of prose in short-burst applications, then later semesters that develop longer-scale reasoning processes and applications. This idea probably needs to be promoted, discussed, and implemented in education and I’m glad you wrote this essay. It’s just that as an old-school English instructor who doesn’t even have a cell phone I’m more aware of the losses to language than any gains. However, if teachers don’t show students how to do text messages well, which is what students write the most of, they’re losing the most ready opportunity to help them with their language.
All your arguments are sound, Greg. The selling point is the last sentence of your second comment, though. Meet the little darlings where they live, show them how hard and rewarding it is to write something short that is also cogent, and then take them by the hand into full paragraphs and beyond.