Crossing Lines: moving students from personal narrative to expository writing
should, considering the metaphor I will be using for the writing process, be Building Bridges...

I want to give you
New Metaphor for the process of writing
Hot stuff, never before heard, how lucky can you get
There is a basic process the underlies all writing, no matter what type, no matter what audience
New Heuristic: might make sense to you...
if it does then it will be clear how to help students move from narrative to expository.
Also points up the problems with the way we have traditionally taught the writing process and expository writing in particular
Finally: suggest that the real question is not whether kids can write expository essays...it is whether they want to.
Can we solve that problem?

What is expository writing? (besides this year’s hot writing topic...MEA’s and all)

Why all the fuss?
The Writing Process: success or failure?
Why can’t our student’s support what they have to say?

Three reasons:
The transfer issue: hypothesis: our students don’t know how to write personal narrative either.

Do they really understand and practice the writing process: most of my students do not revise. I get a lot of typed first drafts. A lot of students still think the writing process is: write down something you think the teacher will like, get someone (a friend) to tell you which sentences need to be fixed and which words are miss-spelled. Make corrections. Turn in. Glance at it to see what kind of grade the teacher gave you. Throw away.

Still, by all measures, our students can write a personal narrative. Conditioning is not learning. To transfer skills you must know what you are doing. Our students often produce personal narrative the same way Pavlov’s dogs salivated for the bell. We say write (ding, ding), and what comes out is Personal narrative...but they don’t understand how they are producing the work anymore than the dogs understood how they made spit.

How is Expository writing different than personal narrative?
Group inquiry: divide into to camps, Personal Narrative and Expository Writing
brainstorm and list the essential elements of good writing in your camp
Whip and record
Compare: note duplicates and equivalences

Well then, how is Expository writing different? In light of our hypothesis it is more useful to ask how personal narrative and expository writing are the same. Differences will become apparent against the background of what is common to both.

All writing shares a basic structure. Parts, real objects, events, characters, represented by words, strung on a thread of connection in way that makes sense...that makes meaning.
So how is a personal narrative constructed? Where do the parts come from? (experience) What is the thread. (time)
Can you see why Personal narrative is so easy?

Story: draws on imagination as well as the real, but the basic structure is the same. Objects, events, characters (that either are real or could be real) strung on a thread of time to make meaning.

This is the key: students must understand that writing is the process of assembling real parts...stuff from the real world or imagined worlds...represented by words, in a way that makes sense...that builds meaning. They need to understand that that is the task, no matter what kind of writing they are doing. The differences between types of writing are primarily: where the parts come from, what kind of a thread you string them on, and, to a lessor extent, how words are used to represent them. If they understand the underlying process, they should be able to transfer skills from Personal Narrative to Expository writing.

Where do the parts come from in Expository writing? (shared experience or text)
What is the thread? (argument: logic, persuasion, cause and effect, reason and conclusion)

Parts come from a narrowing of focus: not the whole world of experience and imagination: only the parts of the world you share with the reader: the subject, the text at hand, the work in question. You can bring in personal experience (you had better) but only those parts that touch the subject. You can use imagination, but only to better represent the subject. Focus must be maintained. The work in question, or the topic in question, is the reality you take the parts from.

We all understand time, do we all understand argument? persuasion? cause and effect? reason and conclusion? Are these any less natural, any less a native part of human existence than time is?
Most children argue before they tell time
When we teach the writing process we begin with the belief that students already have or will develop the language skills necessary to write. Can we do the same for the skills of argument?

Part of the problem is the way we teach expository writing.
5 paragraph essay: we drill this into kids and they still can’t support their conclusions
Essay as mobile
We have to teach it as Essay as bridge

pillar in each mind...yours and readers
conclusion as plank that forms the bridge...tamps down the reader’s pillar
each brick has to be solid or it won’t be duplicated in the reader’s mind...anything that the reader does not know must be supplied.

For this to work, you actually have to teach the metaphor (or some other)
Kids have to know what they are doing with the personal narrative if they are going to transfer the skills to the essay
If they do, then the essay is a just a narrowing of focus and a change in the thread on with the objects are strung.


Which brings us to my second major hypothesis: it is not that kids don’t write good expository essays because they don’t know how to do it, it’s that kids don’t write good expository essays because they don’t have anything to say...they don’t have anything that they feel is worth the effort of saying. If we have something we want to say...we will find a way to say it...and we will keep working at it until it gets said.

Besides the communication skills then we have to teach the thinking skills...the engagement skills...needed. Writing as discovery.

How do you come up with something worth saying on any given subject?
Individual writing, then small groups, then large group discussion.

See The Formal Essay for my attempt to outline the thinking that goes into coming up with something worth saying.

What I am going to do for my students this year is to keep pushing them back to find something they really want to, need to, say about the things we have to write about.

Two kinds of kids: those who are in the process of making sense out of the world and life, and those who are victums. Find what a kid is trying to, or needs to make sense out of, and you have the hot button to attatch writing to. Help them to find something in any thing they are asked to do that will help them to solve one of life’s little riddles, right now, today...and they will have something to say.

So there it is: give students a real understanding of the writing process at it’s roots...teach it across all genres...help them to the skills needed to find something worth saying and they will find a way to say it.