Tuesday April 29, 2014 “College Readiness: Writing to Learn”
Ben Johnson shares his thoughts about writing; “The controversial author Norman Mailer said, ‘I don’t know what I think until I write it down.’ Joan Didion perhaps said it better in this way, ‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.’ Donald Murray, a pioneer of the writing process, stated, ‘…all writers ‘are compelled to write to see what their words tell them.’ There is an amazing power to learn when you read what you have written. When we write to learn, we analyze, we revise, we organize, we rewrite, we evaluate and so on until what is written is what we want to communicate. These are all higher order thinking skills that we aspire to achieve in the classroom setting. The way it works for me is that I start with an idea and write it down. Then, if I get stuck, I play with it (sometimes like a cat with a dead mouse); I add to it, take away from it and shift it until it makes sense to me. Sometimes I have to let it sit for a while. One of my students said she lets it ‘marinate.’ Thinking is hard work. Writing to learn is hard thinking.” To read more about what Ben Johnson says, click here.