The Oxford Learning Beat Writing Program
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you’ve got something to say.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Thought flies and words go on foot. Therein lies all the drama of a writer.”
Julien Green
“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.”
Henry David Thoreau
What Is Writing, Anyway?
Writing is the clear expression of thought. One of the worst things about the education experience, for many kids, is that learning often appears to be mysterious, meaningless, baffling and terrifying… while adults claim that it is simple, fun and self-evident.
Fun is often the operative word. As soon as kids hear the word “fun,” they begin to distrust us. In fact, many kids view an adult’s definition of fun as: F=foolish, U=unusual, N=nonsense.
Kids constantly seek the meaning, the structure, the rules. They want to understand. Just as reading is made understandable when you use phonics, so too is writing made clear when you teach structure and grammar.
Initially, your students may shy away from Beat Writing, but, when you persist, they will soon come to realize that this program opens doors for them by revealing the underlying structure of language.
Let us not forget that clear writing requires clear thinking. Today’s school programs often discourage this very practice by placing too much emphasis on the use of language for communicating, rather than thinking.
Schools teach kids how to communicate, not how to think. They teach social skills. Thinking clearly requires practice and concentration.
If you listen to kids talking to each other, you hear “like” and “as” constantly repeated. This is because kids often think in metaphor and use similes because they do not know how to use language precisely. They have learned to think in pictures because their language programs have invited this.
The difficulty they have expressing themselves in writing clearly stems from this fact. In order to write, students must express their thoughts clearly and precisely using words and language, not mental pictures. Your job is to help them understand how to do this.
Why Can’t It Be Easier? Find out that it can in our next article.
Related Early Learning Resources
