Teaching Thinking on Paper

The symptoms are woefully familiar to college instructors everywhere. Nonsensical sentences. Disjointed paragraphs. Wandering structure. Recklessly dangling participles.

Traditionally, educators have blamed the fact that Johnny can't write on inadequate training in the basics of grammar and syntax. Not so, says A.D. (for Albert Douglass) Van Nostrand, professor of English at Brown University. He contends that the problem is not so much that Johnny can't parse a sentence as that he can't think. Or more precisely, he cannot think on paper. Even a student who is a whiz at grammar, Van Nostrand argues, may be a dunce at stringing together sentences and organizing paragraphs.

Van Nostrand's solution is "functional writing," a teaching method that focuses on drilling students in the art of getting a coherent argument down on paper. The method, now taught at Brown and a dozen other campuses, is not designed to produce future Mailers and Bellows but simply to help budding scientists, engineers and business managers learn to use the written word.

No Monologues. Van Nostrand believes that good writing is all in the approach. Students turn out tortuous prose when they treat writing as a monologue. In functional writing, they are taught to view it as a dialogue with readers. Says Van Nostrand: "It is easier to organize your information for someone else than for yourself." In a typical course, 15 to 30 students meet with an instructor twice a week for 90-minute sessions. The core of the program is a 331-page workbook outlining a series of laborious drills that break the writing process into simple steps.

Sample assignment: Write a paragraph on "the advantages of an encyclopedia in every home." The intended reader--an auto mechanic in his 40s, with children. books in his den. and perhaps the question, "With a library down the street, why do we need an encyclopedia?" First, the student must set down short answers to a battery of questions framed in the special Van Nostrand jargon: What is the reader's "frame of reference"? What is the "organizing idea" (theme) of the paragraph? What "set of information" (facts) will be worked into the paragraph? Only after dutifully outlining the requirements can the student begin to write. When he is finished, he must analyze the paragraph and explain --again on paper--whether his "organizing idea" survived the actual writing process. Finally, he reviews the whole exercise with the instructor, who may order him to do it all over--remembering, of course, the Van Nostrand dictum that a student must write as if he had "a contract with the reader."

Van Nostrand, 54, is a graying, bespectacled and energetic Harvard Ph.D. (American literature). He had been lecturing on the American novel for 13 years at Brown when, in 1964, he volunteered for a job that his colleagues regarded with horror--teaching the required freshman writing course. His students, he soon found, often had grammar down cold but were shaky about organizing their ideas. Later, as a communications consultant to various business firms, he noticed that many executives labored over letters and short messages that turned out to be nearly incomprehensible anyway. The professor's prescription was to isolate the steps involved in writing and thereby take the hocus-pocus out of the process.

Van Nostrand concedes that his drills can be ponderous; his first workbook, he laughs, looked and sounded "like an Army training manual." But students generally find the course helpful. Says Wheaton Freshman Tricia Dunn: "It really makes it clear to me what I'm doing when I sit down to write." Others praise the close supervision, which gives the course the feeling of a private tutorial. Yet the method also has its critics. A common complaint, voiced by another Wheaton student, is that the repetitive drilling can be "a terrific bore and is not exactly creative." Admits Katherine Feeney, a Van Nostrand instructor at Brown: "Sometimes the students feel that it's all too structured." But, she adds, "there aren't many who don't feel amazed by how much they've learned."

Van Nostrand has formed a nonprofit corporation--the Center for Research in Writing--to promote his course, and spends much time pondering new ways to teach writing--and its necessary companion, thinking. "If we could get at what you do when you learn by writing," he muses, "then we'd know how to teach people to think." Anyone for functional thinking?

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