Exercise 2.5 Reading Creatively, Reading Critically
Now that you’ve seen how the double-entry journal can help you analyze an image, let’s try it with a more familiar kind of text. I published the essay “The Importance of Writing Badly” some years ago, but I think it still expresses several of the main ideas behind this book. I’d like you to read the piece critically, though, using the double-entry journal method I just described.
As before, you’ll use opposing pages of your journal.
Step One: Read the essay once through, marking it up. Read it a second time and, on the left-hand page of your notebook, carefully copy lines or passages from the essay that
Connected with your own experience and observations
Raised questions for you
Puzzled you
Seemed to be key points
Evoked disagreement or agreement or made you think differently
Were surprising or unexpected
The Importance of Writing Badly
Bruce Ballenger
I was grading papers in the waiting room of my doctor’s office the other day, and he said, “It must be pretty eye-opening reading that stuff. Can you believe those students had four years of high school and still can’t write?”
I’ve heard that before. I hear it almost every time I tell a stranger that I teach writing at a university.
I also hear it from colleagues brandishing red pens who hover over their students’ papers like Huey helicopters waiting to flush the enemy from the tall grass, waiting for a comma splice or a vague pronoun reference or a misspelled word to break cover.
And I heard it this morning from the commentator on my public radio station who publishes snickering books about how students abuse the sacred language.
I have another problem: getting my students to write badly.
Most of us have lurking in our past some high priest of good grammar whose angry scribbling occupied the margins of our papers. Mine was Mrs. O’Neill, an eighth-grade teacher with a good heart but no patience for the bad sentence. Her favorite comment on my writing was “awk,” which now sounds to me like the grunt of a large bird, but back then meant “awkward.” She didn’t think much of my sentences.
I find some people who reminisce fondly about their own Mrs. O’Neill, usually an English teacher who terrorized them into worshipping the error-free sentence. In some cases that terror paid off when it was finally transformed into an appreciation for the music a well-made sentence can make.
But it didn’t work that way with me. I was driven into silence, losing faith that I could ever pick up the pen without breaking the rules or drawing another “awk” from a doubting reader. For years I wrote only when forced to, and when I did it was never good enough.
Many of my students come to me similarly voiceless, dreading the first writing assignment because they mistakenly believe that how they say it matters more than discovering what they have to say.
The night before the essay is due they pace their rooms like expectant fathers, waiting to deliver the perfect beginning. They wait and they wait and they wait. It’s no wonder the waiting often turns to hating what they have written when they finally get it down. Many pledge to steer clear of English classes, or any class that demands much writing.
My doctor would say my students’ failure to make words march down the page with military precision is another example of a failed education system. The criticism sometimes takes on political overtones. On my campus, for example, the right-wing student newspaper demanded that an entire semester of Freshman English be devoted to teaching students the rules of punctuation.
There is, I think, a hint of elitism among those who are so quick to decry the sorry state of the sentence in the hands of student writers. A colleague of mine, an Ivy League graduate, is among the self-appointed grammar police, complaining often about the dumb mistakes his students make in their papers. I don’t remember him ever talking about what his students are trying to say in those papers. I have a feeling he’s really not that interested.
Concise, clear writing matters, of course, and I have a responsibility to demand it from students. But first I am far more interested in encouraging thinking than error-free sentences. That’s where bad writing comes in.
When I give my students permission to write badly, to suspend their compulsive need to find the “perfect way of saying it,” often something miraculous happens: Words that used to trickle forth come gushing to the page. The students quickly find their voices again, and even more important, they are surprised by what they have to say. They can worry later about fixing awkward sentences. First, they need to make a mess.
It’s harder to write badly than you might think. Haunted by their Mrs. O’Neill, some students can’t overlook the sloppiness of their sentences or their lack of eloquence, and quickly stall out and stop writing. When the writing stops, so does the thinking.
The greatest reward in allowing students to write badly is that they learn that language can lead them to meaning, that words can be a means for finding out what they didn’t know they knew. It usually happens when the words rush to the page, however awkwardly.
I don’t mean to excuse bad grammar. But I cringe at conservative educational reformers who believe writing instruction should return to primarily teaching how to punctuate a sentence and use Roget’s Thesaurus. If policing student papers for mistakes means alienating young writers from the language we expect them to master, then the exercise is self-defeating.
It is more important to allow students to first experience how language can be a vehicle for discovering how they see the world. And what matters in this journey—at least initially—is not what kind of car you’re driving, but where you end up.
Step Two: Now use the right-hand page of your notebook to think further about what you wrote down on the left-hand page. Use the questions in Figure 2.3 as prompts for a focused fastwrite. Write for five or six minutes without stopping.
Figure 2.3 An approach to keeping a double-entry journal.
Note that you should keep track of page numbers (if any) in the reading from which you collected information and put them in the left-hand column or page. Particularly when doing research, you should begin by jotting down key bibliographic information about each source.
Page #
Notes from Reading
Exploratory Response
Direct quotations
Summaries of key ideas
Paraphrases of assertions, claims
Facts, specific observations, data
Premises and reasons
Interesting examples or case studies
Focused fastwrite on material in left-hand column or page.
What’s relevant to the question?
What questions does it raise?
What do I think and feel about this?
How does it change the way I think about the subject?
What surprised me?
What’s the most important thing I take away from the reading?
How does it connect to what I’ve heard, seen, or read before?
Step Three: Reread what you’ve written. Again, on the right-hand page of your notebook, write your half of the following imaginary dialogue with someone who is asking you about the idea of “bad writing.”
Q: I don’t understand how bad writing can help anyone write better. Can you explain it to me?
A:
Q: Okay, but is it an idea that makes sense to you?
A:
Q: What exactly (i.e., quotation) does Ballenger say that makes you feel that way?
A:
Step Four: Finish the exercise by reflecting in your journal for five minutes on what, if anything, you noticed about using the double-entry journal to have a “conversation” with a text. In particular:
How did it change the way you usually read an article such as this one?
How might you adapt it for other situations in which you have to read to write?
What worked well? What didn’t?
Do you think the method encouraged you to think more deeply about what you read?
Alternatives to the Double-entry Journal.
Though the double-entry journal nicely structures your thinking about what you read between collecting and evaluating, generating and judging, it’s hardly the only method for writing as you read. Here are some other approaches you can try:
Three-Act Notes. This is a simple but effective way of thinking about what you just read. Immediately after you finish the text, set it aside and fastwrite for as long as you can, exploring your response. Act 1: In your notebook or in Word, begin with this seed sentence: The thing that strikes me most about this is … and follow it from there, writing as fast as you can. Act 2: Return to the reading. Review your underlinings and reread what you thought were interesting passages, tables, or data. Jot down a bulleted list of key concepts, facts, statistics, or claims that you harvest from this review. Act 3: End with another fastwrite—second thoughts—in which you focus on one or more of the bulleted items. Explore what you find significant, interesting, or relevant.
After-words. At a minimum, spend a few minutes immediately after you finish reading something by beginning with a summary: What I understand this to be saying is…. Get this down first, and then fastwrite your thoughts about the argument, key concept, or significant findings you highlighted in your summary. How does it change the way you think about the topic? How does it connect with other things you’ve read? What do you find surprising?
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