The Better Part…

Today, on NPR’s On Being, I heard poet Sarah Kay quote someone, I forget who, as saying “Listening is the better part of speaking.” It reminded me of a wise philosopher who said “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”

Likewise, it seems to me that reading is the better part of writing. In an interview, the late Pulitzer Prize winning writer Wallace Stegner was asked about the talent of the current crop of aspiring young writers in his writing classes at Stanford. He replied that in terms of talent, over the years young writers have gotten better and better. However, he lamented, as a group they have one great liability: they are not readers. Many, if not most, seemed not to have read much or to know much beyond their own experience. This, Stegner feared, will limit their development as writers. After all, how does a writer know quality unless he has read good stuff? How does he know techniques and how they work? What feel can he have for experience beyond his own? What frame of reference can he have?

This, I would like to think, goes a long way to justify the teaching of literature in our schools. I would like to think that teaching literature and teaching writing go best hand-in-hand. I do not mean just having students write essays and reports about what they have read, although that has its place also. I mean writing parallel to their reading and extending beyond their reading, and bringing their reading back to their experience: the literary work, the student, and the student’s essay.  (If you have yet to make the acquaintance of the late Louise Rosenblatt, remedy that soon: Literature as Exploration, 1939 and The Reader, the Text, the Poem, 1978. Start with the latter. It will change the way you teach writing and the way you read.)

I fear that as Reformism sweeps the nation, literature in our English curricula will be the loser – after all, it is not on the standardized tests by which “accountability” is reckoned. That is probably for the best. I fear the reductionism demanded by the machine-scored bubble sheet test.

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