Where Do We Begin?

We begin with the understanding that both of us are ex­perienced. I have taught more than 10,000 high school stu­dents through the years and have marked well over 100,000 compositions. You have been attending school somewhere be­tween eight and eleven years and have already written hun­dreds of compositions of one kind or another in your various subject classes. Therefore, we can take certain things for granted.

You are not a beginner. You probably have some very good writing habits, which you should retain. Also you must have some rather serious composition weaknesses; other­wise you would not be seeking the help you expect to get from this book. The best approach, then, will be to build up your strong points, eliminate the weak ones, and add a few techniques that will make it easier for you to improve.

You know what a composition is. Teachers have told you time and again that whenever you write—a letter, a book report, an informal essay, an answer to a question on an ex­amination—you are composing and that the rules are essen­tially the same for all the forms: a forceful beginning, a sen­sible and interesting middle, and a logical ending.

You don't have to be sold. By now you are completely convinced that it will be to your advantage to write well.

You've heard the story a thousand times and have had clear evidence of its truth even more often. You know that the good writers among your friends get better marks not only in English but in the social studies, foreign languages, the sciences—in fact, in any subject that requires the ability to express oneself. You know, too, if you are planning to go to college, that some day you will have to send along a sort of biography of yourself together with your application. You don't have to be told how important first impressions are. Nor does anyone have to tell you how much your chances of doing well on entrance and scholarship examinations depend upon your ability to write. On the other hand, if you are planning to go directly into a job or a business after graduation, you surely remember how often your counselors or representatives from industry have mentioned the many writing demands that are placed upon a person who seeks advancement or achieves a position of responsibility. Moreover, there is no need to remind you of the social obligations every adult must assume and the letters, notes, or, sometimes, prepared speeches that are part of everyday living. Yes, it has been quite obvious to you for a long time that when you put your­self down on paper you are exposing yourself to the judgment of other people in a more penetrating way than you do by your dress, speaking habits, or general personality traits.

You don't expect miracles. You’ve learned that some of your classmates seem to have been born with a gift for draw­ing or singing or playing an instrument. Others can take any topic assigned and in fifteen or twenty minutes dash off a piece of writing that more than 99% of the students couldn't approach even if they worked on it for a week. Gifted writ­ers can be given guidance or direction by a good teacher, but native talent cannot be taught! You know that even among the students who average as high as 95% in English it is very unlikely that more than one in a thousand will ever be good enough to enter the professional writing field. That's why you don't expect me to make a poet, novelist, or dramatist out of you. Your main desire is to learn how to write a decent com­position, one that is the best you are basically capable of writing.

You don't want a lot of talk. During my early years, like all young teachers, I used to talk too much. I would drone on endlessly about the meaning of communication, the writer's obligation to let the reader look into the mind and heart of the author, the interrelationships that exist among speaking, writing, reading, and listening. These are all very important concepts, to be sure. But for all my impassioned talk, I wasn't telling my students how the job is done. This taught me a valuable lesson.

You want to know how. You want to know how to han­dle a topic, assigned or voluntary, and say something inter­esting and appropriate about it. You want to know how you can start working without the annoying "staring at the ceil­ing" routine so many students go through. If the teacher re­turns your composition—and it looks as if a chicken had stepped out of a bottle of red ink and had walked all over your paper—you want to know how to "make your introduc­tion more interesting," how to "improve the transition be­tween paragraphs," how to "avoid dullness and repetition," how to "eliminate sentence structure and usage errors," and how to "stay on the subject."

All right, there won't be any lectures on the language arts, communication via mass media, or integrated thinking. One day you may want to investigate thoroughly these aspects of the philosophy of composition. But for our purposes we're going to be completely practical. One thing at a time. We will examine student compositions and analyze why one is worth a higher mark than the other. We will establish defi­nite standards of good writing. Then we will go into the mechanics of starting, continuing, and finishing a composition that will meet these standards. The aim in the succeeding chapters will be to show you how to select better, to plan better, to write better, to revise better—much better than you have been doing up to now. If you mean business, if you are serious about your desire to improve, if you make an honest effort to master the few basic principles involved,, you will be pleased and perhaps amazed at the progress you make.

It's going to mean work, but more than that it's going to mean concentration and practice. No skill is acquired by just reading or thinking about it. A recent tennis champion, in a magazine article, stated that for many years he practiced six hours a day to prepare for the occasional hour and a half it took him to win a match in tournament competition. That's what you'll have to discipline yourself to do—work on your weaknesses on a regular basis until you have eliminated every one of them!

It won't take you six hours a day. You may not have to spend that much time even in a month. However, just read­ing these pages will do you no good at all unless you apply the techniques you have learned every time you write. This is the last and most significant thing we can both take for granted.

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