Can writing be taught?

A controversial article in the New York Times recently took university-based writing courses in America to task … for not actually teaching students to write.

Stanley Fish wrote that ”instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization.

“These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.”

It was his opinion that many students who had gone through composition classes could not actually write.

His comments rang a bell for Richard and me. We run courses in writing skills, both face to face and online. We are often asked how writing can be taught. Many people seem to think that we’re either born with it, or we’re not.

Perhaps we can’t teach someone talent. Although if we are to believe Malcolm Gladwell, they can probably teach it to themselves, to an extent.

His book, The Outliers, mentions the “10000-Hour Rule”. He says success in any field can be put down to practising for a total of around 10000 hours. Gary Player would probably agree. The legendary golfer is reputed to have said: “The more I practise, the luckier I get”.

That means that journaling helps, as will the creative exercises used by many writing classes, including ours, to underpin the skills discussed.

I also believe that we can learn writing through reading. People who read widely take in more than they might realise about timing, suspense, narrative arc ...

We have had participants in our classes who didn’t read much. They were at a distinct disadvantage, having never built up a store of intuitive knowledge. It works the other way round too. Many people tell us that, once they became more aware of writing skills,  they became more knowing readers. And often, more critical readers.

They might not have taken to a book before, but not been able to say why. When they become more aware of the process, they are able to pin it down. It may briefly spoil reading for them, but it can only make them better writers.

We designed our courses through a painful, and extremely vulnerable, process of trawling through our own struggles. But we also read everything we could lay our hands on, drawn from other people’s painful struggles. Designing these courses and forcing myself to become more aware of the skills has, I believe, made me a better writer. (Long may it continue.) 

So yes, we believe in teaching writing. We can demonstrate how crucial Point of View is to the overall success of a work.

We can look at the elements of narrative and the choices that can be made on overall structure. We can give advice on building credible and compelling characters. And then, how best to present those characters without weighing the story down with paragraphs of dreary exposition.

Writing requires a cluster of skills that can be taught – or learned. Okay, we can’t teach genius (and if we had it, would we choose to pass it on? Hmm…) But we believe that you can teach – and you can learn—the skills that have helped create most of the books we each read.