Write for TRUTH!

 

My son Max dancing with no shame.

I don’t remember where or when, but I once heard the following story meant to illustrate how people lose their self-assuredness as they grow older. When you ask a class of kindergarteners how many of them know how to dance, they all raise their hands. When you ask a class of teenagers how many of them know how to dance, maybe only one or two will be brave enough to raise a hand.  I think that the same would be true if we replaced “dancing” with “writing.” I thought of this when reading Ken Macrorie’s “Telling Writing.” I was fascinated by his comparison of a third-grader’s writing and a college student’s writing: “One is dead, the other alive.” I struggled to think back to my own writing in elementary school compared to my writing in college or today. I scavenged for the only piece of writing I have from my youth: an autobiography written in sixth grade. Reading this again of course made me laugh, but some of it also made me wonder if in sixth grade I had already had enough training in “Engfish” to have lost my honesty. Still, there were a few places that I think were authentic, such as this passage: “I was very pleased to find out that my name, Margaret Rose, was the same as the princess of England. However I didn’t look like a princess because my legs were bowed and my toes pointed in and were overlapped.”

The Macrorie reading was by far my favorite this week, and I really appreciated how he used examples of actual student writing. I had much of the article underlined, strong points that resonated with me, such as “A honest writer makes every word pull its weight.” Now, although I felt uplifted that Macrorie says “there is a way out” of the “empty circle (where) teachers and students wander around boring each other,” I was also a little depressed thinking about my own writing. How often does my writing hit even one or two of Macrorie’s eight ways writings gain power? Do I reward my reader with meaning? Do I create oppositions which pay off in surprise? Do I waste words? This is a lot of pressure. These are high ideals. However, Macrorie does also say, “telling our truths is hard.”  I have to remember to keep trying. I have to remember that I may not be the next Steinbeck, but I can learn to write better, to forget the Engfish and “find a voice that rings true.”