Process, Not Product

This article really emphasized what I agree to be some of the largest flaws with the way students are taught to write in schools today. From my own experience, I felt my school did a poor job emphasizing the connection (and disconnect) between good literature and good writing. In our English classes, we read the classes, by authors revered as some of the greats. Yet we picked these works apart for structure, symbolism, and semantics so much that by the end, they hardly resembled a composition. Expected to produce essays in nearly all of our classes, we stumbled to piece back together that which we had deconstructed and the results were usually messes of attempted profundity and garbled logic. As we advanced through the grades, we got better at faking it, better at producing what was expected. But I don't truly believe we became better writers.

The sad part of this essay to me is the near impossibility of implementing any of his suggested "implications." In a school system that is heavily grade-centric, letting students write about whatever they want, take however long they need, and take however long they need to complete the assignment is laughable. There needs to be some way to quantify students, to rank them, especially in schools where the numbers shoot high into the triple digits, teaching writing the way he suggests is a wonderful dream, but not one I see coming true.