Thoughts on Kelly Gallagher

                In his work, Write Like This, Kelly Gallagher takes great pains to highlight how demonstration is the key to opening students’ minds to both the value of writing and their own capability to write. I am pleased to have found this man’s work—it supports my own conclusions about teaching writing. Too often, writing is treated as a mathematical process. Students construct sentences like adding numbers, and copying from the black-board becomes the sacred ritual of successful learning.

                But in reality, writing is more akin to a physical activity. Any description of writing remains entirely esoteric to the uninitiated. Conceiving of “conciseness” and “precision” can only illustrate so much. Writing is best not taught as theory, but instead as practice. We do not explain to a child how to throw their first ball, we show them how by winding back our own arm and hurling it. Writing is the same way; understanding comes from seeing and doing, not hearing and conceptualizing.

                And yet, writing is not taught this way. Part of this is the practicality of the modern school system. It is “more efficient” to disseminate worksheets or offer critique through a students already written assignment. But actually helping the student craft the assignment—demonstrating how to write a sentence, fixing a student’s mangled sentence right then and there and discussing the thought process, or guiding them socratically through questioning to organize both their thoughts and eventual written output—is nearly impossible when you have 25 students.

                A writing tutor has the opportunity and, I would argue, responsibility to engage the student at this level. The results of writing an essay with the student word for word or explaining your thought process and questioning theirs, is almost immediately rewarding. It is also incredibly invigorating as a tutor. It puts you in the moment and allows you to use the craft, a refreshing and empowering experience.

                I am not saying that note taking has no place in the tutoring lesson, but let the notes be derived organically by your work together, rather than lectured. Start with a simple concept such as “Conciseness” and then allow the learning to evolve and be recorded like time-lapsed photographs of a growing plant rather than analytic shots of an autopsy. Because taught the way writing normally is today, that is how the student will see it: a dead body of work they have to pick over and try to emulate. When really, it is an ancient, fluid and constant process of which they can become a part, joining the ranks of all great humans in as crucial a right of passage as one’s first steps.