Scribd
Upload
155 views4 pages

The Importance of Writing Badly

Uploaded by

William J
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
155 views4 pages

The Importance of Writing Badly

Uploaded by

William J
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 4

2/8/22, 3:08 PM The Importance of Writing Badly - CSMonitor.

com

The Importance of Writing Badly


March 28, 1990

By Bruce Ballenger

I WAS grading papers in the waiting room of my doctor's office the other day, and
he said, ``It must be pretty eye-opening reading, that stuff. Can you believe those
students had four years high school and still can't write?'' I've heard that before. I
hear it almost every time I tell a stranger that I teach writing at a university.

I also hear it from colleagues brandishing red pens who hover over their students'
papers like Huey helicopters waiting to flush the enemy from the tall grass, waiting
for a comma splice or a vague pronoun reference or a misspelled word to break
cover.

And I heard it this morning from the commentator on my public radio station who
publishes snickering books about how students' abuse the sacred language.

I have another problem: getting students to write badly.

Most of us have lurking in our past some high priest of good grammar whose angry
scribbling occupied the margins of our papers. Mine was Mrs. O'Neill, an eighth
grade teacher with a good heart but no patience for the bad sentence. Her favorite
comment on my writing was ``awk,'' which now sounds to me like the grunt of a
large bird, but back then meant ``awkward.'' She didn't think much of my
sentences.

I find some people who reminisce fondly about their own Mrs. O'Neill, usually an
English teacher who terrorized them into worshiping the error-free sentence. In
some cases that terror paid off when it was finally transformed into an appreciation

https://www.csmonitor.com/1990/0328/ubad.html 1/4
2/8/22, 3:08 PM The Importance of Writing Badly - CSMonitor.com

for the music a well-made sentence can make.

But it didn't work that way with me. I was driven into silence, losing faith that I
could ever pick up the pen without breaking the rules or drawing another ``awk''
from a doubting reader. For years I wrote only when forced to, and when I did it
was never good enough.

Many of my students come to me similarly voiceless, dreading the first writing


assignment because they mistakenly believe that how they say it matters more than
discovering what they have to say.

The night before the essay is due they pace their rooms like expectant fathers,
waiting to deliver that perfect beginning. They wait and they wait and they wait. It's
no wonder the waiting often turns to hating what they have written when they
finally get it down. Many pledge to steer clear of English classes, or any class that
demands much writing.

My doctor would say my students' failure to make words march down the page with
military precision is another dreary example of a failed educational system. The
criticism sometimes takes on political overtones. On my campus, for example, the
right-wing student newspaper demanded an entire semester of Freshman English
be devoted to teaching students the rules of punctuation.

There is, I think, a hint of elitism among those who are so quick to decry the sorry
state of the sentence in the hands of student writers. A colleague of mine, an Ivy
League graduate, is among the self-appointed grammar police, complaining often
about the dumb mistakes his students make in their papers. I don't remember him
ever talking about what his students are trying to say in those papers. I have a
feeling he's really not all that interested.

Concise, clear writing matters, of course, and I have a responsibility to demand it


from my students. But first I am far more interested in encouraging thinking than
error-free sentence. That's where bad writing comes in.
https://www.csmonitor.com/1990/0328/ubad.html 2/4
2/8/22, 3:08 PM The Importance of Writing Badly - CSMonitor.com

When I give my students permission to write badly, to suspend their compulsive


need to find the ``perfect way of saying it,'' often something miraculous happens:
words that used to trickle forth come gushing to the page. The students quickly find
their voices again, and even more important, they are surprised by what they have
to say. They can worry later about fixing awkward sentences. First they need to
make a mess.

It's harder to write badly than you might think. Haunted by their own Mrs. O'Neill,
some students can't overlook the sloppiness of their sentences or their lack of
eloquence, and quickly stall out and stop writing. When the writing stops, so does
the thinking.

The greatest reward in allowing students to write badly is that they learn that
language can lead them to meaning, that words can be a means for finding out
what they didn't know they knew. It usually happens when the words rush to the
page, however awkwardly.

I don't mean to excuse bad grammar. But I cringe at conservative educational


reformers who believe writing instruction should return to primarily teaching how
to punctuate a sentence and use Roget's Thesaurus. If policing student papers for
mistakes means alienating young writers from the language we expect them to
master, then the exercise is self-defeating.

It is more important to allow students to first experience how language can be a


vehicle for discovering how they see the world. And what matters in this journey -
at least initially - is not what kind of car you're driving, but where you end up.

Related stories

The imperatives of National Grammar Day

Attack of the semicolons!


https://www.csmonitor.com/1990/0328/ubad.html 3/4
2/8/22, 3:08 PM The Importance of Writing Badly - CSMonitor.com

A visit to Tom Wolfe’s ‘Kingdom of Speech’

ISSN 2573-3850 (online)

Follow us:

    
© The Christian Science Monitor. All Rights Reserved. Terms. Privacy Policy.

https://www.csmonitor.com/1990/0328/ubad.html 4/4

You might also like