Category Archives: writing

What Are You Doing About It?

education, writing, , , , , , , , ,

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After seeing the above sketch in her Twitter feed a couple months back, my good friend and teacher-neighbor across the field, Seena Rich, sent me this response:

While she did so gracefully, Seena was calling me out, challenging me, asking me to put my money where my mouth is.

What she wanted to know was: Ziebarth, I’ve been watching you tweet out all your little doodles about that book you read over the summer, so what?!? What are you doing about it?

Up to that point I hadn’t committed to doing anything about my reading other than tweet out the sketches of it. Probably because my head was spinning with ideas, but a book like English Composition as a Happening needs some time to settle, digest, sink in.

I’m grateful for friends and colleagues who push and challenge my thinking, my practice, who get a little antsy when I’m just tossing bread crumbs to the world. Seena’s tweet started me thinking … What have I learned? What is my big takeaway from Sirc’s book?

Respect.

Respect for what my students have to say.

Respect for their voices.

Respect for my students as writers.

Respect for the journey my students are on as writers.

Respect for my students as human beings.

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What’s curious is that I’ve been changing my composition course every year, bit by bit, as my students teach me every year that they deserve and are worthy of my respect.

What this respect looks like in my classroom (and the changes Sirc inspired) is ongoing, and like Deemer says, there is no blueprint. Happenings happen. Teachers must inspire their own. Regardless, I hope to explore mine here in the near future. Stay tuned.

 

Word of the year

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When you read this bit of news I’m about to share with you, you’re either going to wonder: What took them so long? or What’s the world coming to?

So what’s the news?

Oxford Dictionaries announced their word of the year for 2015. All the dictionaries do it— choose a word that’s relatively new that captures the essence of a particular year. This year Oxford’s word is:

tears-of-joy-emoji

You read that right! There’s nothing to read. Just look. Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year is not a word, it’s an emoji. The name of the emoji is Tears of Joy. But you could see that couldn’t you?

I could see this coming. I knew it was a matter of time before emojis enjoyed a wider cultural relevance. I got a good sense of that earlier this year when students and friends bombarded me with texts and tweets, out-of-their-mind thrilled that Apple had, in their iOS 9.1 update for the iPhone, added this emoji:

taco
(To know me is to know that I love tacos)

If you find yourself wondering what the world is coming to, consider what Brad Ovenell-Carter always says, “The ancients stole all our ideas.” We’re just cycling back to our past, back to hieroglyphs and cave paintings. And remember that language itself is made up of images, visual jots and tittles that correspond arbitrarily to things and ideas. And images themselves have their own grammar. We gotta learn to read it all. And write with it all, as my friend Amy Burvall has been emphatically evangelizing for.

So before I fall too far behind this curve, here is my first emoji composition:

emojiquiz-9478   basket.jpg

So just:   

Learning to be concrete and specific

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Photo ©2010 Nayla [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]

“Nine-tenths of all good writing consists of being concrete and specific. The other tenth doesn’t really matter.”
-Harry Shaw

It’s easy for us to be vague and general when we write. But that’s not how we experience the world. The world comes to us specifically: the red of a rose, the moaning of sirens, the squishiness of slugs, the snap, crunch and slippery saltiness of potato chips. But too often developing writers don’t linger on things long enough (or like my father teaches his fifth graders to do: hover), whether they describe an image in a sentence then they’re off to tell us about the next, or they’ve supported a claim with a vague reason or two, then they’re off to write that fourth out of five paragraphs. Either way they don’t hover to allow their readers to discover or experience it for themselves.

I repeat myself repeatedly in class and in feedback to students: be specific, use more details, more evidence. What I’m longing for is for students to clog their writing with more details, more images, more specifics. At least that way there will be more to choose from and work with and patterns will become more apparent.

I have ways and means to help students be more specific, but I’m rethinking them all because they don’t seem to be very effective. Rethinking, nothing. I’m ditching them altogether because I found something I’m hoping will work much better: Lynda Barry’s Six Minute Diary.

Let me show you what it looks like. This is one of my Six Minute Diary entries from a recent-ish visit to Hawaii:

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This format fit my needs perfectly. It was the first time my kids had been to Hawaii and I wanted to capture the experience without spending my time writing a nightly novel, which is what our trip deserved. The trick is to spend two minutes jotting down what you did (or what happened) and another two minutes tracking what you saw (and/or heard as I did here). Then you spend 90 seconds drawing something from the day and a final 30 seconds transcribing something someone said.

Barry says “having to write it down makes us begin to notice when we notice something. We remind ourselves to ‘save’ it for the diary.” It also helps us hone in on the specific. Because we’re going to have to draw something we focus on what we actually see, and our ears are tuned in to the specific because we’re going to transcribe verbatim what we hear.

Then we get closer to how Barry describes the best way to write, “Let the image pull you. You should be water-skiing behind it, not dragging it like a barge. Writing should take you for a ride.” That’s how I recognize good student writing, when I feel like the writer is taking me for a ride. And I know a writer needs more support from me when I feel as if their writing is dragging me along their sentences from a barge, or worse, from a horse along the raw desert floor.

So whether you’re a student in my class, or just someone who’s hoping to capture your world with a tighter net, try out the Six Minute Diary for a couple weeks and see how it focuses your eye and tunes your ears and pulls them closer together with your hands and fingers as you write.

Watch the video below and be timed by the master herself, Lynda Barry.