Learning the Ropes

Well, Rebekah beat me to it - perfect timing on this post! Since today’s class discussion and Perry’s study have given us a new vocabulary to hash this out, I’d like to blend a response and some thoughts of my own here (bear with me). Let’s take a look at the other side of this issue:
We know that writing, like painting or playing a musical instrument, is a complex act – there’s more happening than what meets the eye when a pen crawls across a page or fingers hammer s keyboard. Like art or musicianship, the process of learning to write is also complex. It involves (at least) two important elements- skill and creativity. I think looking at the relationship between these two might help explain why we’re taught in ways that, looking back, seem silly or useless.
The creative side of any discipline is deeply personal, and is grounded in the passion and experience of the artist. To realize one’s creative potential, however, one needs to have the core skills that make it possible. Building up these skills is a process that involves time, effort, and learning from mistakes. We learned from Piaget and Perry that development occurs in stages. At each successive stage, we are capable of understanding more.
Young writers are taught simplistically, and in black-and-white terms, because to do otherwise would be to confuse them needlessly – as anyone currently studying a foreign language knows, learning a general rule and then gradually becoming familiar with exceptions is much easier than simply being told that there is no rule. College students may be able to cope with the latter method, but for young writers with highly limited proficiency, this kind of teaching would be paralyzing. Someone who hasn’t mastered the construction of a coherent argument (most easily explained in that dreaded 5 paragraph theme) isn’t ready for a stage 3 Perryite freakout.



Picasso painted simple portraits before rocking the world with Cubism. Bird played standards before he showed us what it means to improvise. Writers learn the rules – the basics – so they can do the same, well, later on. Whether or not these skills are always taught effectively is another question entirely. Maybe we could do a study of our own to find out, and get Harvard to foot the bill.