Smith, Frank. “Myths of Writing”.
I first read Frank Smith’s article eight years ago, in the summer between my junior and senior years of college, when I took Approaches to Teaching Writing the first time. A lot of what I think about writing has changed in the past several years, but a lot has stayed the same.
At that time, having never been in the classroom as a teacher beyond a few volunteer hours, I didn’t know how I would teach writing. I loved to read, but I did not love to write (gasp!), so I considered myself a “literature person” not a “writing person”. Of course, I recognized the fact that as a teacher, I would have to “do” both. My love for literature was the reason I decided to go into teaching and I figured that the writing part would just naturally dovetail into whatever literature we would study.
Thus, as I started my summer session eight years ago, I unwittingly believed Myth #22, people who do not themselves enjoy and practice writing can teach children how to write. It wasn’t that I disliked writing; it was just my preference to read rather than to write. Having not done much real writing for myself prior to my time at Iowa, I didn’t understand the benefits of it. I fell victim (as a student, not a teacher) to a number of Smith’s Myths, such as Myth #3 (writing involves transferring thoughts from the mind to paper), Myth #8 (learning to write precedes writing), Myth #12 (you must have something to say in order to write), Myth #14 (writing should be right the first time), and Myth #15 (writing can be done to order). The biggest benefit I got from reading Smith’s article was not as a teacher of writing, but as a student of writing. Of course, as I read Smith’s Myths, I realized that I didn’t actually believe them. But I did practice them. Therefore, the first step in evolving into a writing teacher was to dispel these myths from my own writing practices and see what was left.
That is why, at least for me, Smith’s article turned out to be the most useful article in helping me become not only a better writing teacher, but a better writer period. In many ways, I think this article is geared for students rather than teachers: it wasn’t until college that I realized writing-as-discovery was rewarding, useful, and fun. I always struggled with Myth #3 (writing involves transferring thoughts from the mind to paper) because I thought that what I had to put down had to be perfect, even though I knew all about “revising”. The rest of the aforementioned myths speak to the writing-as-discovery journey that writers embark on. As someone who had a problem articulating what I thought, it seems obvious that the whole “writing-as-discovery” thing would have been a natural process for me. But the fact is, it wasn’t. Nobody ever explicitly told me that I didn’t have to know exactly what I wanted to communicate before I wrote it; nobody ever told me that it was okay that I didn’t know what I thought right away, that I could figure it out as I wrote—that I would figure it out as I wrote and rewrote and rewrote. Had I known this sooner, been expressly told the secret, I would have seen the value in writing much earlier and in turn, become a better writer. It is because of my own journey of self-discovery as a writer that I now explicitly teach writing-as-discovery to my students. I am able to practice it in my own writing, and in turn, model it for my students.
As a teacher of writing, I have come to enjoy writing more. I hold with what I said eight years ago: we, as teachers, need to impart the reality of writing to our students. But, what is that reality? That writing is hard? That writing is fun? That writing requires thought and effort and work? That writing is worth it? Sure. But as I’ve been teaching teenagers the last several years, the reality I’ve come to see is that when we teach students writing, we are really teaching them to take the time to discover what they think, why they think it, and how to say (or write) it. Teenagers especially struggle with knowing what they think about something and it is through writing that we can help them navigate their own minds. I still struggle with knowing what I think about something and I haven’t been a teenager for a really long time. Therefore, I still believe that Frank Smith does a service to teachers with his article, but I’ve come to discover that he has done a service to students with his article as well, because after all, we’re all still students of writing, no matter how old we are.
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