9 May 2009
In 1952, during my senior year at Meriden High School in Connecticut, as a member of the English Honors Class taught by Mark Bollman I was required to write an essay for the school’s Hicks Prize Essay Contest. The title of my entry was "A Row of Hedges," and it made an elaborate metaphor: The hedges outside the English Honors classroom represented the succession of our school years; the frame of the window closest to the front of the room cut off the view of the downhill end of the hedges, which represented the future, and so forth and so on. Quite corny, but decently written for a high school senior, apparently, because it was one of the finalists.
Fast forward nine years: At the beginning of my second year of teaching in 1961, at what is now the Cleveland State University, I was asked to address the incoming freshmen at the fall convocation. Reaching back into my not-so-distant past, I refurbished “A Row of Hedges” and turned it into an exemplary talk about the importance of writing in college. Afterward one of the freshmen approached me to say, “I hope you don’t expect us to write as well as that!” I didn’t, but I wished I could have done so.
In the Kennebec Journal for Tuesday, February 24th of this year there was an article by Eleanor Chute the headline of which read, “In Internet Era, Writing Has Taken on a New Importance.” She began, “Bob Dandoy, who has taught high school and college composition…for more than 30 years, still remembers the community college student who, upon being told she would have to write a ten page research paper, got up, walked out and threw up.”
Ms. Chute continued her story; she wrote, “Not all students so vividly display their anxieties about writing, but teachers can find plenty of examples of students who say they can’t write, don’t write, or hate to write.
“Yet outside of school,” she continued, “students and others are writing e-mails, Facebook entries, text messages, blogs, job letters, resumes and more.
“Writing has become so ubiquitous that we are now living in the ‘Age of Composition,’ according to Kathleen Blake Yancey, past president of the National Council of Teachers of English. ‘I think we’re conceiving of writing very differently than we did before. We’re understanding writing takes place in lots of different environments and for lots of different purposes,’ Yancey said.”
On the Larry King Live show this past January 18th the actor Kal Penn said, “I’m an actor; I just read lines that people much smarter than I am write for me.” Writers aren’t necessarily smarter than actors or anybody else, but there is no doubt at all that they can think, because writing is thinking.
Performers get most of the awards, though, the Emmies and the Golden Globes and the Oscars and the Obies and so forth and so on ad infinitum it seems, but every once in a while we get someone who can both write and perform. Such a person is usually a winner of more than just an award.
Back in 2004 when I heard Barack Obama give the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention I came to attention and listened intently. Here was a person who clearly was able to think, and who was able to deliver his thoughts so cogently that it was electrifying. Of course, no one yet had any idea that freshman senator Obama was going to become the next President of the United States, but it was clear to me that he was heading for something big. When he declared his candidacy I was immediately his partisan — I became one of those bloggers Governor Sarah Palin complains about — because what the country needed was someone who could get his or her ideas in order, and then put them into the public mind in such a way that they stuck, and subsequently see them through to a conclusion. So far, he has been able to do the first two things, and I’m sure he’ll do the third as well.
What am I saying to you here today — that it’s possible for any one of you members of the Class of 2009 to become President of the United States? That may, in fact, be possible. More important, though, I am saying that an ability to write, to handle the language in persuasive and cogent ways, is desirable for us all if we wish to be all that we can become, do all that we wish to do in our lives and our careers. There’s a performance component as well, of course, and it would be simply wonderful if we could not only put our thoughts together on paper, but deliver them publicly so that those words would persuade our audience, whoever they might be, to climb on board our train of thought. It would be wonderful if we could all be not only penmen and women but orators as well; at a minimum, though, wouldn’t we all like those ahead of us in the chain of command to be persuaded that we have ideas that need to be reckoned with?
Time for another little story of my own. I was a professor of English for many years, and one of the necessities for academics is that they sit on various committees that quite often amount to very little, accomplish a bare minimum. I sat on such a committee at my college back in the seventies when things were changing in our world. This committee had been given the charge of coming up with rules for what was then called Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employment.
The chair of our committee was a young woman assistant dean. We met with her about once a month for most of the fall semester, but as usual we fiddled and faddled and trod water. Our chair didn’t seem to have much of a handle on what we were supposed to be doing. I got fed up. As usual.
Before our next meeting I wrote an outline of what our goals should be. It was perhaps a page long. When next the committee met I passed around my outline. When our chair read it she fell into a bemused state. Her eyes stared into space. One could practically hear the wheels turning between her ears. Suddenly she simply adjourned the meeting, apparently without having heard a word any of us had said, and we didn’t meet again for several weeks. At our next gathering, though, our chair passed out a document that was several pages in length. What had she done? You guessed it: She had turned my outline into a paper that we read and eventually passed as our final report.
The rules that I had put into outline became the template for affirmative action at my school, and that young assistant dean went soaring off to become a full dean, a vice president and provost, and eventually a college president. Truly, she did. I went on to sit on many more committees before I retired and, of course, to write quite a few books on various subjects, many of them on the subject of writing. I got really tired of sitting on committees, but I never got tired of writing or of teaching people young and old how to write.
May I suggest that you all give a lot of thought, for the rest of your lives, to what it is that you are thinking? And that you spend a fair amount of time practicing getting your thoughts in order in a manner that can persuade the readers of whatever it is you’re thinking that you are someone who needs to be reckoned with? I promise you, if you do those things, you won’t be sorry. Just take a look at President Barack Obama and what he’s been able to do, and think of what he is still to do. Oh, and by the way, I suggest that you read his books. They are very well written.
Lewis Turco
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REMARKS
Thank you so much, Lew,
People up here are still talking about your address to the graduates and how well it connected with everything we have been talking about on campus.... One of our upcoming faculty development days will focus on writing across the curriculum.
Take care, and best wishes,
Geraldine Cannon Becker
Dear Geraldine,
Jean and I had a really good time in Fort Kent. Thank you and Joe for your nomination. We were really impressed that there wasn’t a single hitch in the proceedings! Dick Cost was clearly every inch the Navy destroyer captain, in total control and aware of everything at all times. most impressive. The first time I went through one of these trips and ceremonies I wound up having to buy a new van because mine had to be left behind at a repair shop on the way down (to Ashland, Ohio), and it gave up the ghost on the way back (near Buffalo). It was an exceedingly expensive honor. Tell Dick we were thoroughly delighted with the whole thing, including the trip, on which we both saw a marten and Jean saw an antlered moose.
I'm happy that you're happy. Give Joe my best, and tell him I forgive him for turning into an administrator. If anyone wants a copy of my talk, I've posted it on my blog.
Lew
Lew,
You've heard me spout on about the importance of good writing skills before. Here is an interesting idea.
Jennifer is interviewing people to be on her sales force at her new job (she will soon be the general manager of a hotel that is still being built). She has had to sift through many resumés and cover letters lately. More than a few have been rife with egregious errors that prove that even with a spell checker a person can be dangerous. ('miss communication' instead of 'miscommunication' or 'due able' instead of 'doable', for example, can slip past even some of the better grammar checkers, not to mention spell checkers). It irks her no end but provides some nightly entertainment. I watched her send a rejection to one or two people for such errors. Is that too harsh? Do you think she owes it to these people to explain that she is rejecting them for such stuff?
If she does interview a person, she is considering asking them to write a quick paragraph describing their apartment or house as if they were trying to sell it. She will evaluate them on spelling, punctuation, grammar, and style. Do you think this is unfair? Do you have another suggestion?
Paul
Hell, no, I don't think it's unfair! Illiteracy should never be tolerated. But read my commencement address at UMFK on my blog. It's all about what you're saying.
Lew
