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What
Writing Training Can--and
Can't--Do
by Kenneth W. Davis
Business spends millions of dollars each year on writing training.
Training magazine's 1994 Industry Report found that 54 percent of
organizations with 100 or more employees provide training in writing
skills. But amid all this training lies a dirty little secret. It's a
secret that isn't often told, even among writing trainers and teachers.
The secret is this: training may not necessarily make people better
writers.
One writing teacher who has confronted this dirty secret is Stephen
Krashen, of the University of Southern California. Krashen, in his 1984
book Writing: Research, Theory, and Applications, suggests that
writing involves two abilities. And only one, he says, can be taught. If a
learner has the first ability, we trainers can teach the second. But if a
learner lacks the first ability, training cannot make him or her a better
writer.
Competence
The first ability, the one that can't be taught, is what Krashen
(borrowing a term from linguistics) calls competence. Competence is our
deep, unconscious knowledge of language. We acquire competence in a spoken
language by hearing it, over and over again. We learn how a language
sounds.
For example, can you state the rule in the English language for the
order of adjectives of number, age, and nationality? You probably didn't
even know there was such a rule; you certainly weren't taught it in
school. Nevertheless, you know the rule perfectly. You know to say "two
old Japanese accountants," not "old two Japanese accountants" or "Japanese
two old accountants" or even "two Japanese old accountants." This
rule--not really a rule, but a practice--is part of your competence in
English, learned from hearing and reading thousands of sentences in which
the practice was used.
The English language has tens or hundreds of thousands of such
practices, only a few of which ever get taught formally, in classrooms and
training rooms. Many of these practices--including the example in the last
paragraph--apply both in speaking and in writing. But many others apply
only in written English. Writing demands an explicitness, a clarity, a
degree of organization that speaking does not, and so it requires
additional competence. And we learn such competence only through extensive
reading. We learn how writing "sounds."
This extensive reading doesn't have to be great literature. Sports
Illustrated or Scientific American or Stephen King will serve
as well as Shakespeare. The only requirement is that there be a lot of it,
and that it be self-motivated. For reading to produce writing competence,
it must be transparent. The reader must be paying attention not to the
words and sentences themselves, but to what they say.
So there's the dirty little secret: if a child or adult hasn't done
enough self-motivated reading, no amount of teaching or training will make
him or her an effective writer.
Performance
What teaching or training can do is take readers who already have
competence and give them a second ability, performance. Performance is the
ability to actually produce language. Performance always lags behind
competence. Any parent knows that children have competence in spoken
language (they can understand it) long before they acquire performance
(and start talking).
Almost any child who grows up in a family of English speakers will soon
learn to translate his or her competence into spoken performance. But
performance in writing is much more difficult to achieve. And that's where
teaching and training come in. For adults, training can give those who
already have competence in written English three important components of
performance.
1.
Confidence
The first component that training can provide is confidence. One of the
main reasons that the writing performance of most adults doesn't match
their competence is that they lack confidence in their ability to write.
They are consciously or unconsciously afraid of failing. "Writer's block"
is perhaps the most familiar symptom of this lack of confidence.
So effective writing training is attitude-based. It helps adult writers
realize the competence they already have, and it reminds them that writing
is much more than just following rules. Further, good training stresses
the fact that writing well is not a talent that you are either born with
or not; it is a business activity that can be competently managed like any
other business activity.
As Richard Saul Wurman, president of Access Press, says, "You
shortchange yourself if you think that writing is 'someone else's
problem.' . . . Even if your job description says nothing about writing,
by regarding yourself as a writer, even privately, you can take advantage
of the discipline of the craft."
2.
Process knowledge
The second component that training can provide is process knowledge.
The knowledge about writing that comes from extensive reading is all
product knowledge. Just as you can drive cars for years without having any
idea about the automobile manufacturing process, you can read books and
articles for years without having any idea about the writing process,
about the false starts, and stumbles, and revisions that writers have to
go through.
So effective writing training is process-oriented. Rather than focusing
on details of written products, on clauses and colons, it focuses on the
steps writers go through, the decisions they make. That's why the best
writing trainers are also working writers, "walking their talk."
3.
Reinforcement
The third component that training can provide is ongoing reinforcement.
Some of this reinforcement can be in the form of reminders, of the
attitudes and process knowledge that writers have learned in their
training. But some needs to be in the form of feedback, responses to
writing in progress.
So effective writing training is long-term, not quick in-and-out. It
provides follow-up reinforcement from the trainer, in the form of
"refresher" seminars or in the form of ongoing coaching on actual
documents. More important, it creates communities--writing teams--in the
workplace, to provide valuable peer reinforcement that can promote
participants' continuing growth as writers.
Better writing
These three components of effective writing training are
interdependent. As adult writers become more confident, they become more
receptive to new process knowledge and more willing to share their work
with professional and peer coaches. As adult writers gain more process
knowledge, they become more confident in their writing process and more
skillful at giving and receiving reinforcement. And as adult writers give
and receive ongoing reinforcement on writing, both their confidence and
their process knowledge grow.
Training in writing can't do everything. It can't make everyone a
significantly better writer. But given basic competence--acquired through
lots of self-motivated reading--training can make adult writers more
confident and knowledgeable. And it can turn companies into "learning
organizations," in which writing continues to improve.
A print version of this article appeared in the August 1995 issue
of Training, copyright © 1995 by Lakewood Publications.
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