Writing outside the hamburger

Yesterday, Erika wrote this insightful post, titled Questioning the Five Paragraph Essay.  This was my first visit to her blog, and I'm glad that I ventured outside of my group to check it out because her ideas have really got me thinking.

I'm in the same place with respect to her observations of formula writing in school. The five paragraph essay isn't real world writing nor the type of writing that real writers do. At least, I've never heard someones say, "I am a writer and I specialize in five paragraph essays." And like Erika also brings up, this formula-based approach to teaching writing serves to create a mindset in students that counters their identity development as writers.  Writing becomes nothing more than a formal task, artificial, with an image in place of what it should look like before the first word even gets written.

I know that good writing isn't taught with a formula, but Erika's post, along with with some of the ideas from Ben's demo yesterday, has got me doing some more thinking about why such an approach is even used at all.

My first thought was that practices like the five-paragraph structure, or the "hamburger outline," may have something to do with a combination of how we traditionally view learning in school and that teachers of writing may not be writers themselves.  When you write often, you learn what writers need, you see how writing happens and develops.   That the steps of the writing process happen in the order by which they need to happen and build on themselves.  It's sort of a mess, and it's a process that doesn't fit neatly into how stuff traditionally gets "taught" in school:

.....Teacher with the knowledge, the right answer, guides students in predetermined learning outcomes.....The whole broken down into more easily learnable chunks for teaching.... Rote, low level tasks must be mastered before moving on to the advanced....

It's a model that I think is built on a paradigm of right answers and linear progress.  The formula, and even the corresponding rubric, are pieces that make work together to support an image of good writing that is objectifiable, teachable.

But Nick's "bad writing demo" has got me wondering if the formula writing approach has more to do with creating a definition of bad writing than it is defining the good.  That creating this definably bad writing may be the piece that is most detrimental to teaching writing. Sure, I guess that the two concepts are polar and that one can't exist without the other...But when bad writing becomes something that can be defined, the formula enacts greater power and control.  We fear being told that our writing is objectively bad.  We steer clear of breaking the rules, making a mess, exploring new ways to craft meaning, and thus don't engage in the tasks of carving identities as writers.

I've been here before.  I've been the students Erika describes who asks for the minimum number of paragraphs. Actually, I've written so many formula essays that I got pretty good at them.

 It wasn't these experiences, though, that let me to say that, "yes, I am a writer."  It wasn't until years after I began teaching that I was able to say this.

I am wondering now not just about the conditions that writers need to grow, but also the practices that would against the years of fear created through formulas and hamburger outlines.