Should we teach writing well or badly?

The Donald Graves Memorial Speech
Australian Literacy Educators convention, July 2012

Once upon a time—in 1992—I found myself in Donald Graves’ house in New Hampshire. Linda Rief, a friend of mine, was friend of his, so there we were, somehow, at his place, taking tea with God himself, and his wife, Betty. To put me at my ease, since I was so clearly awestruck, Don said lovely things about my book Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge and asked what I was working on. I told him it was a picture book called Time for Bed due for publication the following year.

‘Can you recite it?’ said Betty. ‘Let’s hear it!’

I began to recite it but was too nervous to remember the words. I asked if I might write it down. So they set me up in Don’s office with a little computer that was hot stuff at the time but can now be found only in museums.

‘Good grief,’ I thought. ‘I’m in Donald Graves’ actual office, typing on his actual typewriter.’ My fingers could barely find the keys. I came downstairs again and, feeling abnormally shy, read them the words that became Time for Bed.

Why was I so in awe of Donald Graves? So honoured to be talking about books and writing with him, and about the teaching of writing? Who was this kindly, inspiring, researcher, professor, and writer of 26 books whose methods had had such a profound and lasting effect on Australian teachers in the early 1980s, me included? What did he ask us to do? And how it was so different from what we had done before? As I wrote this speech, in honour of his influence and his passing, I came to a simple, surprising conclusion. All will be revealed.

I’ll be needing a few writing exemplars this morning in order to make my points (you might like to guess what text-types they are) so let me begin with something that appears on the surface to be inconsequential. [Read: Two Little Monkeys.]

But wait: there’s more.

Oh, that Mem Fox is a monkey!
She’s as cheeky as can be—
Much cheekier than monkeys up any big old tree!
That was only one book, but she has four—
four more new books walking out the door!

Before Donald Graves entered our heads and our classrooms we used to regard writing as a one-shot act, undertaken by students sitting in silence, and completed from beginning to end in one lesson, perhaps once a week, sometimes once a day, or for one piece of homework. The teacher gave a topic such as: ‘A day in the life of a button’; or ‘Finish this story,’ after supplying the first line. The purpose was to hand it in to the teacher for correction and grading, rather than for a genuine response to the meaning. This method of teaching writing had been around for many generations, was accepted entirely as the way things should be and was rarely questioned, although there always existed gifted, enlightened teachers working on their own, who taught writing differently.

In the late seventies and early eighties Donald Graves visited Australia many times and managed, with his famous tact and grace, and his evidenced-based research, to yank us out of our comfortable rut. He presented his research, told us a few home truths, gave us strategies and dared us to be different. We took up the challenge. 

Only writers should teach writing

His first point about the pedagogy of writing—and this was the truth that threatened us most—was that only writers should be allowed to teach writing because writers alone understand the circumstances of creation. They know first-hand how writing happens and why. They have valid reasons for writing. They know about choosing a topic; they know about the early hunting and gathering of ideas and notes before pen finally hits paper or thumb hits i-Phone; (well, he didn’t actually mention the i-Phone but he would have had he known about them then.) Writers, he said, know about the sorting out of random information and how long it takes to get it settled into well-ordered paragraphs; and the necessity of rewriting draft after draft to get the right meaning across; and the work involved in writing an irresistible first line and a perfect set of syllables in the last line; and the anxiety over the possible response; the hope and terror involved; the intense conversations with others; the struggle to find what is called our ‘voice’; the precise choosing of words; the desire to achieve every aim successfully, to change the reader through the reading. Writers, he said, understand the difficulty, the joy, and the power. And with that inside knowledge writers are better able to teach writing with empathy and success.

Which meant, he said, that all of us who thought we were teaching writing had better become writers ourselves: not published writers necessarily, just writers.

What did we do as a result?

Although it terrified us, we set out to discover the difference between real writing and the stuff we had been trying to teach. We did become writers ourselves. We went to writing courses and created writing groups of our own and met in friends’ houses once a week, and wrote for real people whom we wanted to impress. We chose our own topics. We took the time we needed. We wrote in our own voices so our individual personalities could shine through. We chatted with each other about what we were writing or had written. We read our writing aloud to each other. We experienced highs and lows, and the surprising difficulties in getting writing write. (What? You mean writing is difficult?! We had previously scoffed at that idea.) We rejoiced in having real audiences and couldn’t wait for their responses. Becoming writers ourselves was the best in-service ever. It changed our lives; it changed our teaching; and it radically changed the outcomes of the students in our classes.

And what should we be doing now?

So if we ourselves haven’t written anything lately for an audience that makes us excited and nervous at the same time we might have forgotten not only how to write or why, but also how to teach writing. Might it be time to start a writing group, I wonder, to replace the reading group we currently attend.

Real writers are eager for collaboration

Becoming writers helped us to remember another of Don Graves’ insights: that real writers are eager for collaboration. They use other people’s brains to help them get their writing right: family members, friends, colleagues, editors, children, neighbours, writing groups, formal writing courses, and so on. They seek out others in an informal sort of ‘conference’ to bounce their writing off, to ask advice, to check for confusions in their writing, or things they might have left out, or ways of structuring a piece, or proof-reading, or even spelling, or—secretly—in the hope of a little praise and encouragement. We learnt all this by writing ourselves. We practically dragged people off the street to read our writing to, to beg for help, for ideas on how we might improve it.

What did we do in classrooms as a result?

We tried to forget we were in classrooms. We set up pleasantly furnished physical spaces (I remember a lot of baths with cushions in them)—social spaces that allowed children to feel more as if they were in a writer’s studio, working among friends. We allowed children to talk to us and to each other about what they were writing and why. We organised writing conferences with each child to discuss the writing in hand, allowing the child to lead the conference conversation, not the teacher. We wrote in front of children to show them our thought processes; we wrote collaboratively, with the whole class throwing in ideas; we modelled the ways writers talk about their work in progress:
What do you think of my lead? Would you want to read on or not?
Which part did you like the best?
What if I break that sentence into three sentences: that might work better.
Oh no, that’s so sad. I’m so sorry. Thank you for sharing.

And what should we be doing now?

But if we ourselves haven’t written anything for a while, anything public, that is, for an audience that causes our stomachs to flutter, how will we know the power of the of-the-cuff writing conference? We won’t be able to teach writing well unless we understand the need for such chatting in our own classrooms. So let’s do something alarming such as writing a light-hearted poem that sums up this term’s work—a poem to give to the parents on the last day of term. Now that might teach us about writing and how to teach it.

Writers choose their own focus

Donald Graves also alerted us to the fact that writers, on the whole, choose to write about their own current focus. They choose their topic. They choose their own genre. In other words, they know what they want to write and why: a journal, a letter to the paper or the pope, a novel, a protest speech, a blog—well, he didn’t actually mention a blog but he would have, had he known about blogs at the time—an appeal for funds, a family history, a child’s bedtime story, an application for promotion, to name a tiny few of the hundreds of genres available.

What did we do as a result?

It was revolutionary but we allowed children to write what they wanted to write about, what they knew about, what they cared about. We didn’t tell them the formulaic text-type they had to use, so we could all feel calm about the persuasive writing section of the Australian NAPLAN tests. (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy tests,) None of us, let alone eight year-old children, can write persuasively unless we have real steam coming out of our ears about the matter in hand. Manufactured steam just doesn’t cut the mustard. Because we were writers ourselves we remembered that kind of thing; we knew it; we felt it first hand. So we drew out from the children what the children wanted to express instead of imposing our topics on them.

And what should we be doing now?

But what if we haven’t been writers ourselves lately? What if we’ve forgotten how awful it is to be told what to write and exactly how to write it, if we can’t recall the importance of an excited, inquisitive audience ourselves? We might like to sit back for a cool moment and take stock once again, and ask ourselves earnestly what the hell writing really is. And whether it bears any relation to the manufactured horrors we’re currently inflicting on the youngsters in our classrooms in the name of literacy education—deadly formulas on the ways of writing different text-types such as the persuasive, descriptive, narrative and so on. That’s not real writing. It bears no resemblance to writing. Teaching text-types outside the context of passion and purpose, audience and response sucks the lifeblood from natural, vibrant writing and kills it stone dead. Teaching text-types is not teaching writing and never will be, and we’re kidding ourselves if we think otherwise. 

Real writing is a complex process

Another important lesson that Donald Graves taught us was that real writing is a much more complex process than a one-shot act; that it is literally ‘a process’, a predictable series of stages and drafts that most writers undertake between their first thought and their final piece, whether the piece takes an hour, or weeks, or several years to write.

Two Little Monkeys took four years of writing, on and off, to get the rhythm right, to end up not mentioning the leopard by name, to pace the book’s tension in the right places, to work out an ending that wasn’t trite and so on. And my cheeky advert/poem must have looked as if it had been tossed off in a single draft but on the contrary, slight though it was, I wrote many drafts as I changed its genre (advert, or poem, or both?) corrected its rhythm and refined its descriptive, persuasive tone.

What did we do in classrooms as a result?

We said to children, ‘You don’t have to get it right first time. Have a go. Write something, anything. No, there’s no special length. You can’t re-draft a blank page so get something down and go from there. I’ll chat to you about it, never fear. I won’t let you sink. Are you ready to try it out on the class? OK, let’s do it and see how the others can help. No, you don’t have to finish it right now; put it away for a while, try something else if it’s not working for you. That’s what I do. Can’t spell that word? Invent the spelling. Write it anyway and we’ll get it right later. Say what you want to say, as this child did, in a letter to me:
I want to talk about Willford Gordon whatchamacalit oh you know what. I like your book because a little boy did a big thing like Mr.Drysdale because Mr.Drysdale is big. That’s all. By Roderick

And what should we be doing now?

If we are not writers ourselves we will not know, we will not be able to understand, we will not remember that writing is a process, a slow process, an arduous process requiring draft upon draft. And we might therefore teach in an asinine fashion, making ridiculous demands such as: ‘I want this handed up by tomorrow’; or: ‘why don’t you sit this NAPLAN writing test, my little honey bun?’ To become a writer in order to be a better teacher of writers, we don’t need to go crazy and meet our writing group once a week, although that’s fun: wine, carrot cake, gossip and all. But we do need to write a minium of one or two things a year for an audience that terrifies us. Imagine one or two staff members each week, reading a piece to colleagues at the end of a staff meeting. Imagine that sweat!

Writers need a purpose, an audience and a response

Another of Don Graves’ points was that writers don’t write well or willingly without an interested and inquisitive audience. He emphasised the requirement for a real audience but told us there are three key elements in the creation of every piece of successful written communication, from cave paintings to tweeting. (Well, he didn’t actually mention Twitter but he would have, had he known about it.) The three elements were audience, purpose and response. Without an audience to care about the meaning being expressed, he said, real writers don’t write: what would be the point? And if the purpose is merely for grading, again real writers don’t write: what would be the point? And if writers are hanging out for a genuine response to what has been written and receive no such response, they’re reluctant to write for that audience again, since what would be the point?

Can you see therefore, the heart-breaking pointlessness of battering children with text-types, none of which develop passion or competence in a young writer? Audience and response, dear people: nothing else matters: text-types are chosen naturally; they arise organically, as passion and purpose surface in a writer’s brain. I ask myself—and I ask you—how I am able to write in any genre I please without ever having been taught in my 66 years of life a formulaic text-type. Invite me back next year and I’ll tell you how…

Those of us who were writing real things for each other on a weekly basis in writing groups back in the 80s understood exactly how important audience, purpose and response were, especially response. We lived and died for the response, not only to the meaning we were trying to get across, but also to the way we had constructed it.

What did we do in classrooms as a result?

We made sure that children knew their writing would be read to or by others—to a real audience of live and lively listeners so that they would write with much more care and aching and attention and excitement. We had a writer’s chair for our young writers to sit in while they read aloud their work importantly and asked for comments or questions afterwards. We helped the writers choose their best writing and published it in little books that other children could borrow in class or take home and read to their parents. We had celebratory days for the launch of first publications with party food and a speech of congratulation from someone who mattered to the children. Audience was the spur, the purpose was for a response, and response was the reason for writing. We had no tests. We tried not to grade although of course we quietly, constantly assessed.

And what should we be doing now?

Perhaps we could ask ourselves, if we haven’t written anything lately, why that might be? Apart from journal writing which—as a solitary act of stream of consciousness written mostly for our own old age—lacks an immediate audience, we are probably not writing because we don’t have an interested or inquisitive audience in own lives, an audience that might awaken a desire to write, to write often and to write to the best of our ability.

Perhaps you might think of something you want badly for your school, something that will have your own voice heard so loudly and clearly that the response will deliver your dreams. Like this email for example, which came to me earlier this year from a parent in a remote school in Queensland. It’s such a brilliant piece of persuasive writing, and filled with such voice that I’m going to let you read it yourself since that will be faster than my reading it to you, but before you read it let’s ask ourselves if this adult writer knows the formula we are now all obliged to teach about the qualities of persuasive writing. I bet she doesn’t even realise that such a sterile formula exists yet what could be more successful than this?

Dear Mem

This is most likely your first letter from Ero*******a – The furthest town from the Sea in Australia. We are far far far away from the big smoke in South Western Queensland and we have a very small school with five wonderful big hearted kids.

Like most Queensland children, they have now seen firsthand the effects of flood (the entire town was submerged to varying degrees) and unfortunately they have also seen the effects of drought.
In October, these five children are hoping to travel on camp to Brisbane and visit the Qld Museum, Science Centre, spend a day on one of the Queensland Police Boats etc. To make this possible, we like all schools, have to fund raise but with only five kids, it makes it a little bit hard and let’s face it, door knocking in an area like this is not really possible unless you have a pilot’s licence. Now, the kids don’t always miss out living out yonder, let’s take the end of year Christmas play, the kids not only get a lead role but five or six…

A brain storm was had by the parents and it was decided that a one off monster raffle would be held. We plan to start the raffle in late April with the raffle rounding up in early June. We have planned various avenues of advertising including email, social media networks and flyers at local venues such as post offices, grocery stores etc (These local venues are 106 KM from us…

So here is the big ask…donations……Anything that could be raffled for example a mobile phone, vouchers, products (large or small), seconds/old stock and non productive staff members…well you get the drift….We are in need of a big item to draw in the crowds and I don’t really want to auction my hubby (the local cop, well I do, but have been told it is illegal and then there will be a fight when the winner wants to return him and for some strange reason the house has been packed up and I can’t be located)…

We hope to hear from you soon and should you require further information, please contact Mel on (That is Mel…on …not Melon but if you are willing to donate, I am fine with being called just about anything) ****** alternatively, the P and C email address is ******************* . Contact can also be made via the Ero*******a State School on *************.
Thank you so much for taking the time to consider our request and we hope to hear from you soon.

Warmest regards,

The Ero*****a P and C Association

Mel must have loved writing that. I certainly loved reading it and was spurred into immediate action on her behalf. Every macro and micro thing that Donald Graves taught us about writers and writing can be found in her hysterically funny email.

This speech, too, though very different, has all the hallmarks of Donald Graves’ teaching. I found it difficult and challenging and took almost a month to write and re-write it. A friend asked me once how it was going and I said, ‘Fine, really—it’s sort of finished, but it’s boring. All I have to do now is make it interesting.’ Good grief, I thought: All I have to do now is make it interesting. The task was enormous. I thought: I’m a grandmother now. I’ve lost it. I even ended up in hospital for four days although they tried to tell me it was a viral infection not an ALEA presentation that had caused it.

What I had forgotten, in the creation of this presentation, as I forget almost every time I sit down to write, is that the writing process never changes. I had forgotten that it’s never quick; it’s never easy. I had also forgotten that it never fits comfortably into this text-type formula or that, whether it be picture books or tub-thumping convention-centre protest pieces about the teaching of genres outside the context of a reality that has meaning for the child. I had forgotten, in my anxiety to get things right, the essential writers’ maxim of: ‘Why would I write if I knew what I were going to say?’ By writing this speech, harking back to the core of Donald Graves work, I re-learnt what writing really is, and rediscovered a key insight as to how it might be better taught: by teachers becoming writers themselves.

In case you need to re-visit my opinions may I guide you to a pre-historic article on my website: Notes From the Battlefield (1988). I consider it the best thing I have ever written. (I know! I peaked early.) And should you be further interested, may I alert you also to the book English Essentials which I wrote with a colleague, Lyn Wilkinson. It explains to teachers, students and others what real writing is and how to do it well.

I could not have written this talk had Donald Graves not touched my writing/teaching life so deeply. But here I am finally, at the end of it —my speech, not my life! — having been carried on his wings as I paid grateful homage to his work, hoping that I have made a small difference to your thinking, your teaching, your students, and your own varied lives. Thank you so much.

The Folly of Jolly Old Phonics

A phonics tale of three children (with morals for teachers of reading) © Mem Fox 2008

This piece was presented at a conference of Auckland principals in Auckland, New Zealand in April 2008

Thank you. It’s great to be here. My husband is hoping I won’t have free time to buy shoes since shoes are infinitely more interesting in New Zealand than they are in Australia. Many things are more interesting in New Zealand:

the scenery, the accent, the passion for rugby and the fact that for most of last century you led the world in the teaching of reading. Your famous educators: Sylvia Ashton Warner, Don Holdaway and Marie Clay blazed a trail for the world to follow, and we in Australia followed in your footsteps like grateful children learning from wise parents. Our school children benefited massively from your wise counsel.

On my last few visits to this country however I’ve heard murmurings of discontent from your very own teachers regarding the direction some New Zealand schools are taking in the teaching of reading. It appears that far from being confident leaders with brilliant theories and practices to share with the world there’s a feeling abroad that perhaps other countries like the United Sates, with its current heavily phonicated methods, have better ideas; that programs such as the Spalding Method, Accelerated Reader and Jolly Phonics—by the very fact of their being so expensive and so well-marketed—¬must be better than anything you had before; that you’re such a tiny nation you couldn’t possibly have the best ideas, and so on. What a ridiculous notion, for heaven’s sake!

I’m here today to beg you hang on to your old way of doing things in literacy education, to continue to be to be leaders still, not followers. Leaders think. Followers don’t. Leaders have a good grasp of their subject. Followers don’t know what they’re talking about. Leaders speak with confidence. Followers fumble. Leaders have status. Followers have no status: they’re pathetic. Leaders have authority. Followers have none. So why, after being leaders in literacy, would you want to follow anyone else? In particular why would you want to adopt a single idea about the teaching of reading from the United States, a country in which literacy standards has fallen drastically over the last ten years?

Before I burst a blood vessel over this let me take a short break and read you a book of mine that seems to me to apply to principals as much as it does to pirates: read Tough Boris.

To return to our former topic, the strength of New Zealand teachers was—and still is in the main, so let’s not panic yet—that they truly understood the nature of phonics and the role that phonics played in the teaching of reading. In this speech I’m going to revisit phonics, through three parables, as it were, as a sort of revision for those of you who might have become a little hazy on the subject. Those of you who know it all—and I do apologize because I know there are many in this audience who do know it all—might like to have a little doze from time to time. Here goes…

Once upon a time in Australia there lived three children. Their names were Sean, Justin and Josephine. Sean lived in Hobart, and still does. Justin lived in Melbourne, and still does. And Josephine lived in Adelaide—and still does, around the corner from me. Each of these children learnt to read before he or she went to school, without any lessons. How this happened is fascinating. And challenging. And ultimately, confronting for those of us in literacy education.

Let me tell you about Sean first. About five years ago I received this message on my website:

Your books hold a special place in our lives, wonderful memories of baby and early childhood. Our son was able to read grade two readers at 3yrs, two months and recently a national show was aired on him called ‘genius kid’. I read to him every day from five months on and now he reads to his baby sister and has done so from the time she was three days old. I followed your advice and think ‘Reading Magic’ is one of the most valuable books ever! Mem, we can’t thank you enough for making it so easy and so much fun. Hope we meet you someday, Angie, Sean and Sarah

Angie had provided an e-mail address so I wrote back and asked if I could phone her and talk about this amazing occurrence, and we chatted for ages one Sunday morning. Lo and behold: it was the same old read aloud story—a story that never ceases to excite me, no matter how often I hear it.

Angie told me she began reading to Sean—who is now nine—from three months and that Time for Bed was the first of my books she bought.

Angie couldn’t remember exactly when she first read Reading Magic, but she was fairly certain it was when Sean was almost two years old and she claims she was an instant convert. She said she couldn’t believe it could be so simple and told lots of her friends about Reading Magic, for which I could kiss her feet. Sean’s reading developed very quickly. At 3yrs 7mths he had a reading age of 7yrs 7mths and a vocabulary understanding of a child of fourteen and half and Angie says it was just from doing the things I recommended. (What a publicist! I should employ her.)

Sean appeared on Today Tonight, a tabloid TV evening program in Australia. The segment was called Genius Kid. He was also on the front page of the main newspaper for southern Tasmania, in an article entitled ‘Smart Sean in a class of his own’. Here’s part of it:

When Russel and Angelea Galloway have trouble with their computer they turn to their four-year-old son Sean for help. ‘He normally works it out,’ Mrs Galloway said at their home near Sorell yesterday.

Sean is a gifted child with an IQ rating of 147. He has already been accepted into the high IQ organisation Mensa…

Mrs Galloway said: ‘He just seems to be good at everything yet he is a perfectly normal loving child.’At fifteen months Sean could identify all the letters of the alphabet. His maths and spelling were also rated equivalent to a seven year old.

The Galloways call themselves as ordinary people. Mr Galloway is a free-lance cameraman while Mrs Galloway is a full-time mum. Their second child Sarah was born four months ago and Sean has been reading books to her since she was two days old. Sean reads up to ten books a day.

So that’s the story of Sean. I’ll skim over the story of Justin because his story is told in full in the chapter of Reading Magic called ‘Proof’

In brief, Justin’s parents, Allan and Donna Bartlett, read aloud regularly to their son with remarkable results. Justin was twenty-one-months old when they first contacted me.

He had been introduced to books at six days old. It had seemed to his parents like a good thing to do—it added interest to the daily baby-care routine—and he seemed to like books and being read to, right from the start. By three months he clearly knew which way a book should be held, and he could even turn the pages on cue, responding to the obvious pause in reading at the end of a page. By three months!

At twenty-one months he had a speaking vocabulary in excess of five hundred words, which his mother attributed to what he had gained from books. He could also sight-read about twenty words. Incredible: before he even turned two.

You and I know that most children learn don’t learn to read at home—they learn soon after they start school, when everything they already know clicks into place with the help of a teacher. But a growing number of children is learning to read before they start school and they’re learning quickly, happily and easily, like Sean and Justin.

I need to read you Koala Lou before I tell you about the third child in my Tale of Three Children. [Read it.]

I’m happy to have made the acquaintance of my neighbourhood wonder-girl, the glorious Josephine, who was able to read anything at the age of three which is when she and I met. She is now seven. She lives in the street that runs into mine, and on Boxing Day 2004 she and her mother Liz dropped by to introduce themselves and to show me how much Josie loved my book Koala Lou. She read me the whole book, self-correcting when she needed to. Her dad is an accountant and her mum is in human resources. Neither has been an educator. They told me they didn’t know how it had happened. When I asked if they had read aloud to her, they both said: ‘Of course. All the time. Ever since she was born.’

Josephine was read the same stories repeatedly, hundreds of times. Her mother told me that Josie taught herself to read using whole words. She did not use phonics to learn new words and is very confused if this method is thrust upon her. When someone tells her that hot is made up of the sounds: huh-o-tuh, Josie quite rightly hears her otter instead of hot. When she doesn’t know a word she asks what it is, and remembers it next time she sees it, because she sees it over and over again as books are read to her and as she reads them herself. From the words she already knows she applies logic to extrapolate what other words will be in the sentence she’s reading.

Which is exactly how our daughter Chloë learnt to read, two weeks after she started school, aged four and half. She’d heard the same favourite books read time and time again, had watched the print, and had joined in. And then, like the prima donna she was, she demanded that she be allowed to read the books herself, preferably on audio-tape so she could listen to herself later. When she didn’t know a word I told her what it was immediately so she was never held up, so she could keep the story going, so she could storm ahead with blind courage.

‘You will tell me the difficult words, won’t you, Mummy?’ she’d say, as she launched, pell-mell and fearlessly, into reading a story she loved. I remember two words in particular, in different books, which she hesitated on: cosy andinvestigation. I told her what they were. A few pages later, when the same words reappeared, she read them without any hesitation whatsoever. And of course she saw them again and again during repeated, joyful, shared readings of those same books.

When children learn to read before school without any lessons, they do so because they’ve been looking at the same print over and over again as they’ve listened to the same language, in the same stories, which have been read so many times that their parents are driven to distraction. Not only does the print become familiar, language becomes familiar.Learning to read is much more about learning language that it is about making sounds from the letters on a page. It stands to reason that it’s going to be easier to readdriven to distraction if we’ve heard driven to distraction over and over again, than if we’ve never heard that phrase. In certain situations, the moment we read driven to we’re going to expect a word like distraction to follow, and the print will confirm it.

Anyway, that’s the end of my Tale of Three Children and Chloë. What implications does my tale have for teachers of reading?

Most methods, at most schools, tend sooner or later to get most children reading. Research tells us it’s the teacher, not the method, that makes the difference. However, in the light of recent movements and arguments in the teaching of reading, it’s important to understand the intricacies and meaning of phonics which is basically the ability to sound to break words up into smaller pieces and sound them out, as in: c-a-t says cat.

And where does phonics fit into reading education? Before we go any further we need to ask ourselves a more fundamental question: what is reading? It’s making meaning—please hang on to that piece of information—it’s making meaning, not sound, from the marks we see on the page. Take this sentence: ‘There was a tear in his…’ We can’t say the sound of the word ‘tear’ unless we know its meaning in the sentence: is it a tear in his eye, or a tear in his shirt? Merely sounding out the phonics of t-e-a-r gets us nowhere: context is all important. Which is why random words lists are such a idiotic idea.

It transpires—and I find this fascinating—that children like Sean and Justin and Josephine, who learn to read without any lessons, and could read fluently at the age of three, never sounded out words phonically as they learnt to read. In other words advanced readers don’t use phonics, even at the age of three. They, and we who are fluent readers, use phonics only after we have learnt to read, when we meet difficult, multi-syllabic words that we can’t make sense of by the usual logical means: through print, or grammar, or a prior understanding of what we have just read, or through general knowledge.

We use phonics when we realise we’ve spelt something incorrectly, as I did earlier when I was writing the word ‘capability.’ I had to break it up into the five syllables to get it right. Phonics was really useful in that situation. In fact we can’t write without phonics which is why we should be teaching reading at the same time as we’re teaching writing—as we’re teaching reading—as we’re teaching writing—as we’re teaching reading—and so son..

Phonics is also useful when we come to a word we don’t know, such as the Polish surname that the Sydney entrepreneur, Richard Pratt was born with: Przetitzki, which is very difficult for English speakers to read, unlike: ‘The cat sat on the frigging mat.’

But a capability in phonics doesn’t mean competence in reading. It’s quite possible to read with all the correct phonics in place and yet not to be reading at all. For example, I can read phonically correctly the entire Indonesian edition of my picture book Hattie and the Fox without understanding a word I’m saying:

‘Ya, ya, ya!’ kata babi.
‘Peduli apa?’ kata domba…

Correctly sounding out the words is not reading, it’s barking at print, retrieving no meaning at all from the text. So it’s disappointing to discover that many parents, politicians and even a few principals think that decoding phonics correctly is indeed reading. I’m sure you’ll agree that getting the phonics right is completely pointless in the ‘”Peduli apa?” kata domba’ situation,.

Only 50% of the words in English are phonically decodable This is a a nuisance, especially for the mad keen phonic-ators among us. It’s my sincere hope that we’re able to go beyond a 50% literacy level in Australia and New Zealand. We have, actually. We’re always in the top four in the world after Finland, and sometimes Canada. The Finns have an unfair advantage over us: their language, like Indonesian and Italian, is phonically simple.

And if phonics is so important, so fundamental, so essential—as so many claim—and so crucial to our ability to make meaning from text, how come we can read the following with ease?

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that the frist and lsat ltteers are in the rghit pclae: the rset can be a toatl mses but you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This is bcuseae we don’t raed ervey lteter but the word as a wlohe.

So, hey, waht does this say abuot the improtnace of phnoics in raeidng? Prorbalby that phonics ins’t very imoptrnat at all. How apcoltapyic is that, in the cuerrnt licetary wars!

As if that weren’t proof enough that phonics is useful but not essential, here’s more: how can it be possible that the billions of people in China and Japan, Korea and Taiwan learn to read when there is no phonics possible in their written language, which is displayed, instead, in pictographs? Children in China have to be told what a word is and then learn to recognise it and memorise it. Amazing what they achieve, isn’t it? All those billions of people, deprived as they are, poor things, from the apparently essential benefits of phonics, becoming competent in literacy.

Sadly, let me say this again: phonics-mad literacy terrorists truly, madly, deeply believe that’s making sounds is all there is to reading. How sad. How pitiful. As if we’d lie in a bath on Friday night and read The Da Vinci Code aloud. Most of us read silently when we read at all. Within that silence meaning is made, and within that silence we’re able to read much more quickly than we do when we read aloud.

When we force poor little reluctant readers to read to us and when we tell them to sound out words they don’t know, instead of simply giving them the word, they tend to read so slowly that they make little sense of the print and receive no joy from it. (‘Giving the word’ is what the parents of young early readers are know to do.) Children who are reluctant, remedial readers may perhaps be able to complete a little book tortuously and phonically correctly, but there’s no reward in it, no excitement or passion, or emotion of any kind.

These unfortunate children don’t love reading because they’ve never been read to. They can’t see the point of reading, because they don’t receive meaning or fun or value from it, even though they can decode words nicely. How ironic it is then, that we tend to each phonics heavily to the very children who need phonics least: the confused children, the ones who can’t yet read.

Sadly, because of the money to be made from phonics programs, and the ease with which these programs can be tested and ‘researched’ phonics has been claimed in the USA in particular to have been ‘scientifically proven’ to be the best method to teach reading. If we scratch a quick-fix, sure-fire method of ‘curing’ reading difficulties we will often (but not always) find behind it a core group from an education publishing house, or a government department, or an institute in a university which stands to gain massively, financially, from their endeavours. Many expensive programs that you and I see in use in classrooms are earning bucket-loads of money on the basis of a flawed understanding of reading, and a wilful misinterpretation of research. It sickens me.

The current methods used to teach reading in the USA are causing such a worrying decline in reading standards that many American states have hired teachers from Australia and New Zealand who are working at this moment to improve literacy in failing schools. There are in 536 of these teachers in New York alone.

Why would you and I even contemplate changing from the best methods in the world to the least effective? In Australia, due to the methods we use to teach reading, 66% of Australian children list reading as one of their favourite pastimes. How good is that?! I feel inordinately proud of that statistic.

It’s simple: children who arrive at school without any exposure to books, print, pictures, page-turning, and gorgeous stories that lighten up their lives need only that when they arrive in school: an enormous and intense exposure to books, the same books over and over and over again; an exposure to print through Big Books and to the details in the pictures; they need to experience page-turning; lots of chat about what’s going on in the story and about the funny things in the pictures; gorgeous stories that lighten up their often sad lives; and lively teachers who switch them on to loving books, and who create a longing to be able to read. A phonics-first-and phonics-only approach can never in its wildest dreams achieve the same effect. I mean, compare this kind of literacy-learning with a phonics lesson: read The Magic Hat. A multitude of explicit phonics lessons can be taught from the pages of joyful books by teachers who are excited by teaching—teachers who make children excited about learning.

Do we want children whose backgrounds (both rich and poor, let’s get that clear: this isn’t about monetary disadvantage it’s about a read- aloud disadvantage)—do we want children whose backgrounds have lacked books to be resurrected into literacy in our classrooms or crucified on the cross of phonics? I certainly know which I’d choose. [In my second presentation tomorrow I’ll be explaining in detail your vital role in making this happen.]

The funds currently directed into the miracle cures and quick fixes in reading—out of which publishers make billions of dollars—would be better used in schools by providing children with a class library of appropriate classics that have been adored for years, instead of the mind-numbing ‘readers’ currently in vogue. With this kind of action—who knows?—we might even wipe out illiteracy in a single generation. How about it? We could at least try.

Notes from the battlefield

Towards A Theory Of Why People Write

(This article was first published in ‘Language Arts’, Vol. 65 No. 2 Feb. 1988)

I’m a writer. As such I often see myself as a bloodied and wounded soldier staggering around a battlefield in an attempt to conquer the blank page. As a soldier in the thick of it all I will try to explain from the battlefield why I write and why other write around me. I’ll also try to puzzle out, from the perspective of a war correspondent who stands back and observes, why there are so many deserters out there, refusing to take up their pens and write alongside me. Is it becausethe wages aren’t good enough? Is it because there’s nothing worth writing for? Is it because it’s only a pretend battle with pretend rewards for pretend winners? We’ll see.

Research on how writers write has been illuminating. We choose our own topics, decide our own purposes, target our own audiences, take our time, draft and redraft, talk over our writing with trusted friends and colleagues, and publish our pieces if we’re lucky. As a teacher I’ve applied these writers’ conditions in my classes and I’ve noticed, of course, a consequent improvement in the effectiveness of my students’ writing.

What interests me now is not so much how writers write, but why we write. What drives us to do it in the first place? And then what makes us want to do it well? If I can find the answers to these questions I might dare to ask myself another: what are the implications for teachers of writing?

When I was still in the hunting and gathering stage of this book, lost in a wilderness of notes, my husband came in to give me a cup of coffee.

“You look really tired,” he said.

“I am,” I replied, “but I don’t mind. I like doing this because it matters.” I heard myself say “it matters” and my mind leapt to its feet in a single bound. So that was why I wrote: because it mattered. Was this already an answer to one of my questions?

I wondered immediately why it mattered. First, I’d been asked to write it by people whom I liked and admired, so I felt I had to demonstrate my worthiness. I know that an expert is anyone from out of town, but I wanted to prove it to my American readers. It also mattered because of the effect I hoped it might have on me, on you, and on our teaching. I wanted to make a contribution to our thinking, to create a reaction, to cause us all to shift our attitudes somehow, no matter how uncomfortable that shift might be. I wouldn’t have dreamt of stumbling into this battlefield and sweating over such an enormous project had I not ached with caring about the insights I wanted to share and the response I was trying to achieve. I had, clearly, a huge investment in this piece of writing.

I used three phrases in that last paragraph which I’ll be reiterating throughout this chapter. Whenever you read them, I’d be grateful if you’d think of yourself first as a writer and then as a teacher of writing, and ask yourself when you or your students last ached with caring over what you were writing, or wrote because it mattered, or wrote because you had a huge investment in your writing.

Let me begin to focus on caring by way of another story. I teach a compulsory preservice course in language arts to first-year teacher education students. For some years we set the following assignment: that students should write a letter to the parents of a class of imaginary children explaining the recent innovations and peculiarities in the teaching of reading and writing. It was never brilliantly executed. It was not a real letter, it was an assignment to be marked. It didn’t matter to the students; they had only a temporary investment in it which was to pass the course and they certainly didn’t ache with caring over the response because the audience was imaginary and the response therefore impossible. We don’t set that assignment anymore because something occurred which taught us a great deal.

At the time of this assignment, a literacy crank well known in the letter columns of our local press wrote yet another letter to the paper. This time it was in horrified protest at the slovenliness of the “process approach” to the teaching of writing. Three of my students were up in arms about it and decided to write a reply. They huddled together for hours drafting and arguing. They were in and out of my office all day reading me this sentence and that. I watched them do that T.S. Eliot thing of engaging in “the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings”. They ached with caring because it mattered. They worried about the spelling and punctuation, not wanting the geriatric literacy freak to jump on them and say, “I told you so!” And then, bliss and heaven, it was published!. With a huge headline! It was picked up by talk-back radio and the lines ran hot for half an hour. What a response! What a real reason to write.

At the same time as that real letter was published the same three students handed in their pretend letters to the parents. I found it hard to believe that students who could on the one hand write so well could on the other write so indifferently. The development of their writing skills in their letter to the paper was palpable, but it didn’t flow over into their imaginary letter for the simple reason that “let’s pretend” isn’t real, doesn’t matter, lacks any investment, and won’t get a worthwhile response.

If, as this story might imply, language develops only when it is used “for real”, then might I suggest that we’re currently wasting a lot of time by setting unreal writing tasks in our classrooms: filling-in-the-blanks exercises, copying-chunks-from-encyclopedias exercises, make-believe job applications, “Answer-ten-questions-on-Chapter-Six” exercises, pretend-letters-to-parents exercises, and so on. You and I don’t engage in meaningless writing exercises in real life—we’re far too busy doing the real thing. And by doing the real thing we constantly learn how to do the real thing better. Giving unreal writing activities to our students is about as useful as giving occupational therapy for stroke victims to people who are in perfect health.

Among the various drafts of this chapter are sixteen different leads, one of which has currently ended up in my final paragraph because there it’s effective: it helps me to sum up and conclude on a powerful note. It would have been crazily unconnected to have kept it at the start of the chapter, but I might have left it there had i not cared about you, my audience, my readers. I wanted you to understand clearly the meanings I was making because they’re important to me. The result? I revised. I developed as a writer by developing my writing, which sounds tautologous, but isn’t. If the children in our classes don’t care about their readers, how can they develop as writers? They can’t, because they won’t care about what they’re writing, and they won’t want to revise.

Here’s another example of caring being the key to development. It isn’t about writing, it’s about speaking but I think you’ll see why I want to relate it. In their first semester at college all my first year students take a course with me designed to improve their own writing and reading, speaking and listening. For years they have told each other stories in class, recited poems in class, designed and performed choral speaking in class, and read aloud picture books and excerpts from children’s novels in class, always to the same audience: their peers. It was merely satisfactory. One year, in a blinding realization of my own stupidity at the meagre purpose of these “in-class” assignments, I organized twenty-eight groups of students, about four to six in each group, to visit twenty-eight different real classes in schools close to the college. Their task was to devise and perform a half-hour program of story and song, recited poems and choral poems, picture book readings, and enthusiastic raves about appropriate novels—anything, in fact, which would enhance their listeners’ language development. I called the assignment “Language Alive”.

How can I describe the difference in my students’ attitude and commitment? It was as if I’d asked them in the past to potter along country lanes in some old Model T Ford and was now surprised to find them screaming down the straight in top gear in the Adelaide Grand Prix. Dreading the imminent and real audience galvanized them into quite a different sort of action: they ached with caring about the response and rehearsed for hours outside class times.

My students’ enjoyment of language was extraordinary. I was moved by how happy they were, astounded by how hard they worked, and stunned by how much they developed. I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development, and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine. It’s all so obvious that I feel rather shy about telling these stories.

I recall my daughter, Chloë then aged sixteen, being embattled with an important Matriculation assignment: a six-thousand-word reflection on her involvement in the Matric play, “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-moon Marigolds”. Every so often she would read bits of her piece to her father and to me. Being so caught up in my own writing must have made me a highly unsatisfactory audience. One evening she read this:

“We realized we had no live rabbit. The problem of the rabbit was one that was to hang over us—no! Not us, me—for what seemed to be an extremely long time. The production began to be divided into three distinct periods: B.T.R. (Before the rabbit); D.T.R. (During the rabbit); and A.T.R. (After the rabbit). I look back on the weeks B.T.R. with considerable affection.”

She stopped suddenly, looked at me, and said, “You’re not laughing enough!” I was chastened. Her purpose in reading it had been to make me laugh. I had merely smiled and it wasn’t anywhere good enough for her. I hadn’t noticed how much she’d ached with caring.

When she read sections of the same piece to my husband, it was to ensure that the content is sufficiently detailed and the writing sufficiently alive. “Is this what they want?” she asked. My husband was a Matric Drama moderator so from him she was looking for the response of an expert. From me she wanted the response of a clown. We provided these responses and she was encouraged to continue.

I wonder how often I’ve given my students an opportunity to write a piece which might have two or more purposes: to make someone laugh, for instance, as well as to fulfil the requirements of a formal assignment. Have I ever given any indication that I enjoy laughing and would be quite happy to roll around the floor in hysterics while I’m marking their assignments? Do I allow students to hear me laughing over their writing, so that they’re encouraged to write again? Yes, sometimes I do. I have a loud laugh and have often been asked to “shush” when I’ve disturbed other groups of readers and writers in my class by laughing over someone’s writing. But that disturbing laugh is important: it indicates to my students that their writing is effective and therefore worthwhile. My red nose and blotchy eyes are similarly important: “Hey, guess what, guys? Mem really cries if your writing makes her sad.” In other words, if they have ached with caring over what they’ve written, they know I will ache with caring over my response.

One more related story: my position as a published writer in the college means that colleagues view me, erroneously, as an ideal person to talk to about their own writing although I am acutely aware that anyone can respond to a draft in terms of what’s confusing, boring, missing, or riveting. Be that as it may, a colleague in environmental education came into my office once, so aching with caring over mining in national parks that, as he began to read the ending of his first draft of an open letter to the South Australian minister for the environment, he actually wept. I couldn’t believe it! He cared so deeply about the potential response from the minister, he wanted so much to transform the minister’s ideas and to alter the minister’s actions that he was in and out of my office all day with newly refined drafts. The final letter was tremendously powerful. I wish I could discover what sorts of things my students care enough about to make them weep with worry as they try to get their writing right.

Chloë, my drama queen, understands the thrust of my academic passions as a teacher of the teaching of writing and is wary of it. She looked up from her own writing one evening and said challengingly, “I’m not enjoying this, you know. I hate writing.” She was attempting to undermine my thesis, but I didn’t kill her. I have other ways of doing battle. Instead, I returned the challenge: “Well, how come you like writing to J.J. so much? You haven’t even met her.” J.J. was her New York pen friend. I had set the trap and she fell right into it. This was her reply: “Well, I’m making friends with her. We like each other. You get to know people through letters. She writes excellent letters and so do I. We’re friends.” Aha! She’d admitted to caring about the relationship.

Mitchell and Taylor (1979), in their pivotal and still relevant paper on audience/response model for writing state: “…the writing on the page is not a concrete object but one portion of a relationship.” All writing, that is, not just letter writing. I know, intellectually, that language is an interactive, social process but I’m only just beginning to understand what that means, emotionally. My writing, I’m realizing, nearly always has the socially interactive purpose of either creating relationships or ensuring that established relationships continue. I’m being terribly careful about how to behave in the minefield of this first chapter because you, dear reader, matter to me so much. Your possible reaction keeps me nervous and on my toes.

Whenever I write, whether it’s a picture book, or my journal, or a course handbook for students, or notes for the milkman, there’s always someone on the other side, if you like, who sits invisibly watching me write, waiting to read what I’ve written. The watcher is always important. I’ve discovered I never write for people of no importance. Showing my writing to that watcher makes me feel weak and vulnerable and almost incapable of battling on. My shakiness over the first draft of this paper for example, was so extreme that, while my husband was reading it, I had to leave the room. My only other responder was a woman friend and colleague whom I knew I could trust. I knew she’d still like me even if, in her opinion, I’d written rubbish. Our relationship was, thank God, unassailable.

The more I admire my potential readers the more carefully I write and the more often I revise. Recently I wrote a student handbook for the second semester aware, of course, that I was continuing a well-established and hilarious relationship with my students. Of much more importance, however, was the colleague with whom I was about to teach the course. I look up to her. I try to emulate her. I admire her. I wrote the handbook for her, battling over it for weeks. I wanted to bask in the warmth of her praise and gratitude. The handbook was an enormous personal investment in my continuing relationship with her. My writing was currency and her response was my dividend.

How often are our students able to receive a response from someone they particularly admire? Some of mine (but never enough of them) admire me. As their teacher I am temporarily important enough for them to ache with caring about what they write for me. Or am I fooling myself? They never write anything for me that isn’t also read aloud in class. Is it the response from that wider audience which makes their writing matter? I don’t mind what it is as long as someone’s response makes them care enough to write effectively, for without that caring how can their writing develop through revision?

I had been corresponding with the children from Hallam and Berwick Primary Schools in Victoria for years. In 1987 we finally met. I arrived armed with photographs of my house, my pets, and my family. We had established such an excellent relationship that the children were sad Malcolm and Chloë couldn’t come too because they felt they knew them. But Malcolm and Chloë had written them letters which I read aloud:

Dear Berwick and Hallam kids,

Please keep my mother for as long as you like. I only want her back for Christmas, Easter, and birthdays. Why do you like her so much?

Love Chloë

Dear Hallam and Berwickites,

I must have Mem back within twenty-four hours or she’ll turn into a toad. Please look after her carefully and return her in one piece.

Much love, Malcolm.

When I arrived home on the following evening neither Malcolm nor Chloë wanted to hear anything about my trip except the children’s response to their letters. Whenever I steered the conversation to more exciting matters, they demanded further, deeper, more fulsome news of the reactions from each of the twenty-six classes. They had written for the purposes of getting a reaction and maintaining a relationship. I was irritated until I realized they were providing me with data for my research into why people write.

I think we tend to forget about this element of relationships when we teach writing. Are we aware of how much our students dread having their writing knocked back? Do we trample on their vulnerability when they limp in, unarmed from the battlefield? Do we remember how much the caring over their writing is often also an aching to make friends, with us, and with their mates? It’s hard to keep in mind the painful wounds of battle and the importance of mateship unless you’ve been wounded yourself. Teachers of writing who have been soldiers themselves, engaged in a writing battle, must be able to empathize more closely with the comrades in their classrooms than teachers who are merely war correspondents at the hotel bar, as it were, watching the battle from a safe distance, declining to get in there and write themselves.

When the refreshing ideas of Donald Graves swept through our writing classes in the early eighties, I believed that the ultimate purpose in writing was the response, by someone, that what had been written was worthy of publication and was then published. Since then I have become a published writer myself and I realize how wrong I was. It’s what happens beyond publishing that’s important: it’s the response to my work that matters. Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge has been published in both England and the United States. In America it is loved and I’m feted for it. In England no one seems to know about it, except for my sister, so I get no response, so I get despondent, and wonder why I ever bothered to write it. Then I come home again and a colleague comes into my office and sobs hysterically for two hours. She’s just read the book and is overcome because her own mother has Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a wonderful response.

Yet another story! When I left Australia aged six month, I was Miss Partridge. When I came back in 1970, I was Mrs. Fox. Friends of my parents called Mr. and Mrs. Bunney (yes, really!) looked after us in those first few months and helped us to settle in. Bronte Bunney later employed me and we worked together at the college for fifteen years, often laughing over the ridiculousness of our surnames. When Bronte retired, I wrote him a tiny book called The Bunney and the Fox. It was published. I “published” it myself. I couldn’t find him on that last Friday afternoon and I longed to find him to watch his response as he read the book. I was desperate. I’d heard he’d be clearing out his office on the Saturday morning. I went there. He wasn’t. I drove to his house. He was out. I was ready to scream. In the end I left it by his front door knowing gloomily that I’d never see his response, I’d just have to wait to hear it. Here’s the book:

The Bunney and the Fox

Once upon a time there lived a Partridge and a Bunney. The Bunney was beautiful and brilliant but never bashful. And he was always busy. One day, far across the world, the Partridge turned into a Fox. And not long afterwards she travelled to the place where the Bunney had his home. For a long time the Bunney and the Fox worked happily side by side. Not much changed except that besides being beautiful and brilliant the Bunney was also very kind to the Fox. He encouraged her greatly and said nice things to her face and behind her back. And the Fox became so used to having the dear Bunney around that when the Bunney went away—as indeed he did—she wondered, with a lump in her throat, whether she really could live happily, ever after.

I can’t imagine my students ever chasing anyone around the countryside in a desperate craving for a response to their writing but that is my goal.

There are responses and responses, some of which are financial. I wrote Sail Away partly to make money. I have earned such a sum from Possum Magic that I had been continually running after myself in order to pay the provisional tax. In fact, for a long time after Possum Magic I labored under the illusion that the financial benefits of writing were among my purposes for putting pen to paper. I’ve come to discover that this isn’t really the case.

Several years ago I wrote a long and passionate newspaper article for the on why we send our precious only child to the local state high school instead of to a private one. I was paid for this article in March. For some reason was never been published. Every Sunday morning I would stagger bleary-eyed down the drive in my battered blue dressing gown and ripped open the paper in a fever of anticipation.

Nothing! I realized two things: first, I wanted to be published more than I wanted to be paid. Second, it was the reaction to my piece that I longed for. Publication was merely the first hurdle along the road to response.

Nevertheless, knowing that cash can be a tremendous incentive, I did suggest at a crowded workshop at Teachers’ College, Columbia University that we pay children for what they write before we put their pieces into a class library. Wouldn’t you think that a writing seminar in New York, of all places, would be full of hustlers? But no! Lucy Calkins was speechless. Was it with horror? And Shelley Harwayne was in hysterics. In spite of that, I bravely paid eleven of my students for the privilege of publishing their writing in a booklet called “Picking Up the Pieces”, a booklet designed to demonstrate to other students what I believe effective writing to be. If royalties are a post-publication response which matters enough to make my students ache with caring, I think it’s worth considering, outrageous and grubby though it may seem at this moment. If it’s good enough for real writers, why isn’t it good enough for real student writers?

I think it might be safely said that in general people don’t expect to write much after they’ve left school, except when it’s absolutely necessary, as a tool, in letter writing for instance, or when it’s part of their work. In short, it’s seen as a chore. The view that writing might be fun, or amusing, or relaxing is not, I imagine, widely held, and we teachers must be to blame for that.

During the writing of this chapter a letter arrived from one of my publishers, exhorting me to write a poem for their forthcoming volume for children called “Vile Verse”. I put the letter away. But when the going got tough, the tough got going. In the same way as one searches for handkerchiefs to iron when the strain of ironing shirts becomes too much, I began to work on a poem, as a form of relaxation. I remembered with delight the groans of disgust from kids who’d heard my first putrid poem, “The Teacher’s Cold”, and set to with energy to write the following:

“Sweet Samantha, Unrefined”.

When sweet Samantha eats her food
She is exceptionally rude:
Her mouth is always open wide
So you can see the view inside.
It’s not a pretty sight, my friends,
To see how Sammy’s dinner ends-
Across her tongue the pieces float
Around her teeth, towards her throat:
You almost vomit while she chews
And tells you all the latest news!
It’s terrible when fish and chips
Come shooting forth between her lips
Or when she’s eating lamingtons
And bits of coconut grow wings
And catch you right between the eyes-
Your stomach soon begins to rise!
But scrambled egg is quite the worst:
It looks as though her cheeks will burst
With all the stuff which fills her mouth
From east to west and north to south.
My dears, it is a frightful sight
When sweet Samantha takes a bite,
So my advice is stand well clear
Especially when she starts to cheer,
And do make sure that you have dined
Before, Samantha, unrefined,
Attacks her stew and starts to chew
And sprays her food all over you…

As I wrote that very vile verse, I realized that my purposes for writing anything never come in ones but always in twos and threes or more. Firstly, I wrote it because it was fun. I also wrote it for Chloë because I knew it would disgust her and that we’d laugh over it together, thereby building on our continuing relationship. I also wrote it for Malcolm who was tapping away on a calculator looking very despondent over our finances. I knew it would cheer him up, not only because it was so revolting but also because it would earn a dollar a line if were published, thereby enabling him to pay at least $28 off the Visa bill. And lastly I wrote it for the children of Australia as an antidote to the honeyed sweetness of my Possum Magic and Hattie and the Fox.

I hadn’t realized how often I wrote for fun until my Malcolm read the first draft of this paper and said, “I’m amazed that you haven’t explained how writing is central to your life. It fascinates you. It rewards you. It fatigues you. Nowhere have you actually said you can’t live without writing.” Can’t live without writing? Had I heard correctly? I loathe writing! It’s so easy to do badly and so difficult to do well that I quail before each new writing task. I particularly detest the battle to produce a picture book story in less than 750 words. Of course I can live without writing—or can I?

One day when I was out shopping I met the deputy principal from Chloë’s primary school. She had, that very week, come across a letter I’d written back in 1977 about Chloë being absent from school. She’d kept it because it had made her laugh. Goodness knows which letter it was; I’d written so many for one reason or another. Chloë’s tenth grade maths teacher has a whole file of them, each attempting to be funnier than the last to distract his attention from her dismal performance and incomplete homework. It’s true I can’t live without writing. Every time the chance to write arises, whether it’s to the window cleaner about leaving the dogs in the back garden, not in the house, or to the lawyer about the proliferation of Possum Magic products and its ramifications, my aim is to enjoy myself. I love imagining the reader reading what I’ve written because, I suppose, I’ve had such terrific responses in the past. I just can’t resist messing around with writing.

I can’t not try because my sense of audience is so strong. It might result from having trained as an actress for three years in the Stanislavski tradition: I can see and hear my imagined readers very clearly. I can’t even sign a birthday greeting without going into battle with the blank side of the card. A feminist bookshop in Adelaide was having its fifth birthday so I signed a card but couldn’t seal it. I stood pondering in the post office. The bookshop is called “The Murphy Sisters”. What could I write? All I could think of was, “The boy stood on the burning deck…” The boy? For a feminist bookshop? Suddenly it came:

The girl stood on the burning deck
Her feet were full of blisters
She could not move-
Her head was in
A book from Murphy Sisters.

What does all this have to do with the teaching of writing? First, I wonder how often we demonstrate our crazy, private note writing to our students? It’s probably not much of an option in their lives because they don’t know that it’s possible, that such fun exists, and that it’s rewarding for its own sake, let alone for the glorious responses it creates. I’m wrong, of course. They do know. What about all those underground notes students write to each other in class? Why can’t we legitimize it? Wouldn’t it make our classrooms come alive if kids giggled and shrieked in the open about writing that was written in the open, instead of underground?

Second, isn’t it incredible how often writing means writing stories? I can’t stand writing stories. Honestly! I never write them from my imagination—only when an idea from life or books jumps into my head, not out of it. I have about four ideas a year and I’m a proficient, professional, published writer, yet we ask children to write story after story. What’s wrong with letters, for instance? Clarity and voice and power and control are much more easily developed through letter writing because, perhaps, the audience is so clearly defined and will, if all goes well, respond. Writing for fun is not just for fun—it’s for the long-term, conspicuous development of the craft itself.

Within the fun of writing there is also power. It seems to me that the most delicate transactions are best dealt with through a sort of self-effacing humor which makes one’s point without causing offence. But do we ever communicate the possibility of this kind of writing to our students so that they might become similarly empowered in their own lives? I shared the following letter with my students to demonstrate the kind of writing I have used beyond my schooling. It was to the architect of our home extensions, toward the end of the building project:

Dear Brian,

Here I am, home again, and eager to bring The Extension Situation to a close. The State Bank is satisfied with the work and will pay the builder as soon as we indicate in writing that we are similarly satisfied. A few things still require attention, however.

1. There are still no handles on the drawers in my office. This is, as you can imagine, an extreme hazard to my nails!

2. The toilet seat is so badly positioned that it will not stay up. I fear the intimate damage this may cause any male guest…

3. The bricks in the patio have not been replaced and, as it is unlikely that we shall excavate for buried treasure in the near future, I would like them replaced as soon as possible.

4. Although we do not see eye to eye with our neighbor (he is very short), I would be unhappy to see him killed by falling bricks when he leans over the fence to gasp in admiration at our extensions. The brick wall separating our properties could, at present, be pushed over by a child. The damage to the wall was caused during the initial excavations. Early rectification of this danger would be appreciated.

5. Otherwise the place is a perfection of taste and convenience—thank you! I love it. The State Bank mentioned that the builder was expecting all the rest of the money. I was puzzled because I understood that we would save approximately $2,000 by not having a retaining wall built. I have exquisitely good eyesight and search though I might, I cannot find a retaining wall! I hope that you can clarify this situation. I am a writer, not a mathematician.

With happy thanks, Mem Fox.

I am not at all surprised, considering the purpose of this letter that Mitchell and Taylor (1979) understand writing to be “a means of acting upon a receiver. Its success will be judged by the audience’s reaction: ‘good’ translates into ‘effective’, ‘bad’ into ‘ineffective’. Instead of a product, we are studying an interaction, a dynamic relationship with all the complexities that involves.” (p. 250) My letter to the architect was framed and now hangs upon his office wall among his diplomas. And the extensions were completed to our entire satisfaction. The letter was effective.

I’m anxious about the power or lack of it in school writing. Power is about being able to craft a piece of writing so effectively that its purpose is achieved. “Craft” means understanding the nature and importance of leads and endings; of showing, not telling; of sharpening and tightening; of structure and focus; of purpose and audience; and of the conventions. “Craft” means being able to put those understandings into practice. “Craft” means struggling in that battlefield between the brain and the hand until the best possible draft is achieved. Children won’t learn how to be powerful by writing identical letters to Mem Fox, as so often happens, alas. So depressing!

I use the power of my own writing regularly, to manipulate the world into granting my wishes. For example, I remember applying for and receiving vast funding to attend a conference in New Zealand at which I wasn’t even presenting a paper. The committee concerned had collapsed into unwilling giggles over my application and, hey presto, there was my air ticket! And best of all, in 1986 I jumped over five incremental steps in my promotion to Senior Lecturer, a feat so daring I wouldn’t have attempted it had I not had confidence in my own power to write a sufficiently stunning application.

Such power doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from practising writing for real reasons. It comes from having read powerful writing. It comes from having been taught, and I mean taught, the basic skills of spelling and punctuation in the context of real writing events. Those of us who write best have most power and therefore have most control over our lives. It seems to me to be a supreme arrogance on our part as teachers not to see that the granting of this power to our children is politically and socially essential. In the end they must be able to spell and punctuate; they’re powerless without those skills. Their power won’t come about without practice and the practice can’t come about without purpose. The hardest thing for me as a teacher is discovering purposes which will excite my students to such an extent that they’ll risk the trauma of the writing battle. It’s hard, but it mustn’t be impossible, for their sakes.
I haven’t given much thought to it yet, but I have more than a hunch that power in writing actually deteriorates the further ahead children travel in their schooling. Many of my teacher education students after twelve years at school come to me helpless and fearful as writers, detesting it in the main, believing that they can’t write because they have nothing to say because they haven’t cared about saying anything because it hasn’t mattered because there’s been no real investment for so long. How I wish we could change this situation. We must give power to our people.

Before I’m carried from this battlefield on a stretcher, let me rapidly summarize my notes. The insights I have as to why I write make me believe that as a teacher I must try to:

• help students to care about writing by making it real

• give my students opportunities for real responses from people they admire

• create situations in which students always own the investment in their writing

• be sensitive to the social nature of writing, and the vulnerability of writers

• demonstrate and encourage writing for fun and huge enjoyment and power

• respond after publication as well as before

• help to develop powerful writing so that my students can control their own lives

In my last will and testament I’d like to leave you this theory: children develop language through interaction, not action. They learn to talk by talking to someone who responds. They must therefore learn to write by writing to someone who responds. It’s not a new theory, but it’s one I keep forgetting even though it’s so clear and simple. Please keep it somewhere safe.
I don’t mind if you, dear reader, forget most of what I have written in this chapter except for one phrase: “to ache with caring”. If we as teachers ache with caring it will, perhaps, be possible for us to create classroom communities within school communities in which writing matters because it’s done for real reasons by real writers who “ache with caring” for a real response.

My hope is that through the grimy windows of my particularity we’ve been able to peer into a more generalized world; that we can now move into that world as agents of change so that our students write more, write more often, write more effectively and with greater willingness and enjoyment. I wish we could change the world by creating powerful writers for forever instead of just indifferent writers for school.

References

1. Mitchell, R and Taylor, M, “The Integrating Perspective: An Audience/Response Model for Writing.” College English, 41 (1979).