<\/b>Tuesday\u00a0April 29, 2014 \u201cCollege Readiness: Writing to Learn\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
Ben Johnson shares his thoughts about writing; \u201cThe controversial author Norman Mailer said, \u2018I don\u2019t know what I think until I write it down.\u2019 Joan Didion perhaps said it better in this way, \u2018I write entirely to find out what I\u2019m thinking, what I\u2019m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.\u2019 Donald Murray, a pioneer of the writing process, stated, \u2018\u2026all writers \u2018are compelled to write to see what their words tell them.\u2019 \u00a0There 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 \u2018marinate.\u2019 Thinking is hard work. Writing to learn is hard thinking.\u201d \u00a0To read more about what Ben Johnson says, click here. \u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tuesday\u00a0April 29, 2014 \u201cCollege Readiness: Writing to Learn\u201d Ben Johnson shares his thoughts about writing; \u201cThe controversial author Norman Mailer said, \u2018I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching-tips"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5DI6r-k5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1246,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1245\/revisions\/1246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}