Francis-Noël Thomas & Mark Turner, authors of Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition) have written A Natural Way To Write, an op-ed which explores the concept of “teaching writing” and examines the process of writing itself.
A Natural Way To Write
Traditional writing instruction tacitly assumes that writing is a normal human activity requiring no fundamental cognitive work. “Teaching writing,” following this assumption, is almost entirely concerned with teaching surface conventions. Almost everyone acknowledges that attempting to teach writing this way is not very successful—it works best with students who have already achieved a high degree of writing competence on their own and rarely if ever does much of anything for students who have not.
We begin by acknowledging the fundamental fact that writing is utterly alien to the human evolutionary endowment. On the evolutionary scale, writing is a recent invention, at most eight-thousand years old. For most of its history, it was a special purpose activity, the province of a tiny group of professionals who used it, for example, to record inventories. Literature is considerably older than writing. And even after writing was invented, poets such as Homer remained illiterate. Writing as we know it today in literate societies is only a few hundred years old and has a limited reach. Much of the world’s population is even now illiterate. It is a mistake to treat writing as a common, species-wide behavior like talking or walking—a mistake that is possible to make only because the human species is exceptionally skillful at acquiring and then obliviously inhabiting “second natures.” All writing is exotic, but in literate societies it is now taken as “natural.”
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