Writing is not Formulaic

The American education system is broken. Private testing companies make millions of dollars off "testing" students on their "competency" in given subjects. They promote ideals of what should be learned, which advocates a dominant narrative of education that is not inclusive to all students; rather it is exclusive to new ideas and new approaches to teaching. In the field of English Language Arts, the educators hired by testing companies communicate that the best writing is streamlined writing--the Five Paragraph Essay, the TEETH approach, this approach not unlike a mathematical formula-- is the best way to turn students into sufficient communicators in society. What utter horsesh*t.

The fact of the matter is, there is no cookie-cutter method to deliver effective writing. Sure, all one's paragraphs should have a point, and one's essay should communicate a major argument or "thesis," but to box it up and simplify it with a formulaic approach like the five paragraph essay stifles creativity and makes literacy and learning to write all the more challenging.

I see this very often when I tutor students, especially First Year Writing students, at the Writing Center. I remember meeting with one woman who had just graduated high school a few months earlier, and she was trying to write a history paper while adhering to the five-paragraph format. She had about six very long paragraphs (she bemoaned the fact that she couldn't fit all of her ideas into five), and I told her to abandon what she had learned about the five paragraph structure. I told her that sentences are thoughts, paragraphs are ideas, and paragraphs are woven together to promote a central point, argument, or idea. After breaking up her paragraphs into several more, her draft was very much improved, and she was visibly relieved of that constricting writing mindset.

Christensen certainly echoes this in the second chapter of Teaching for Joy and Justice.  Throughout, she discusses how writing, and all the flavors of it, are inappropriately appropriated into curricula in such a way that diminishes its artistic value. One such way is devaluing the narrative essay, as many educators, (or corporate interests?) she claims, view writing narratives as "self indulgent, like recess or poetry for finger painting..." (60). This is because those educators (or corporate interests) posit that "students learn to write narratives in elementary school; in high school, they need to move up to essays" (60) But to diminish the narrative is to diminish the humanity inherent of writing. Writing stories of one's past or even using the first person in scholarly essays brings a sense of personality and humanity to the piece, and this is appropriate because all writing is created for, and distributed by, humans. To detach the humanity from any writing is crude, inappropriate, and yields terrible writing approaches for both authors and audiences. 

Thus, I could not agree more with Christensen when she highlights the value of narrative writing. Often, throughout high school, students are asked to critically analyze a text. However, how can they effectively do that if they do not understand how the text makes them feel? Perhaps by giving prompts that ask the respondees to write about how a given text makes them feel, they will yield better writing because it challenges them to consider their emotions. By implementing emotion into writing, they bring their humanity to their writing, and through writing, humanity is beautifully expressed. Thus to omit narrative writing, to streamline writing through a mathematical, formulaic approach, is a gross injustice to the teaching of writing and general communication in this digital age.