I’ve been at this, oh, at least two weeks without citing Dr Fish’s regular opinion piece in the NY Times. Here he is, in full gladiatorial mode, taking on critics of his assertion that writing should be taught, well, by rote:
The research that led Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones and Lowell Schoer to conclude in 1963 that “the teaching of formal grammar has a negligible . . . even a harmful effect on improvement in writing,” is no doubt correct but beside my point; all it proves is that “drilling students on parts of speech” (McLoughlin) doesn’t work. What does work, I have found, is something quite different: drilling students in the forms that enable meaning; and these are not inert taxonomic forms, but forms of thought.
Thus:
Content just sprawls around; forms constrain and shape it… The formal repertoire makes content-based performance possible; without a formal repertoire, internalized to the extent of being automatic, performance is haphazard and without shape or boundaries.
We have, and I hadn’t entirely known this, spawned an entire area of research on how to teach composition only by writing about things. This is born of that 60’s era belief that grammar, form, structure, and so on–nuts and bolts–are unworthy or simply impossible objects of education unto themselves. Fish has, admirably in my view, spend a good deal of an already illustrious and combative career showing these claims to be false, precisely teaching these things successfully. Credit to him. More of us should do the same.
Tags: composition, Fish, writing