Episode 40: The Art of Writing, Part 1
This week on The Literary Life podcast, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas sit down with Karen Glass for a conversation centering on the topic of writing. They discuss the problem of trying to teach writing in a formulaic way. They also talk about the challenge of helping students learn to think well in order to write well.
Karen highlights narration as a tool to teach thinking well in the form of oral composition. Cindy digs into the idea of imitation as an integral part of the learning process. Angelina and Karen both emphasize the importance of addressing skill and form on an individual basis, depending on what your student needs to improve.
Tune in again next week for Part 2 of this great conversation!
Listen to The Literary Life: Commonplace Quotes:To write or even speak English is not a science, but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
George Orwell
Rhetoric, or the art of writing, is not governed by arbitrary laws. Its rules are not statutes passed long ago by some assembly of critical scholars; they are merely common-sense principles derived from the observed practices of persons who have succeeded in writing well,\u2013that is, from the method of good authors. Hence, when we study composition, we investigate these methods, in order to apply them in our own writing.
from \u201cManual of Composition and Rhetoric\u201d
Follow Your SaintWhen a child is reading, he should not be teased with questions as to the meaning of what he has read, the signification of this word or that; what is annoying to older people is equally annoying to children.
Charlotte Mason
by Thomas Campion
Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet;
Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet.
There, wrapp\u2019d in cloud of sorrow, pity move,
And tell the ravisher of my soul I perish for her love:
But if she scorns my never-ceasing pain,
Then burst with sighing in her sight and ne\u2019er return again.
All that I sung still to her praise did tend,
Still she was first; still she my songs did end;
Yet she my love and music both doth fly,
The music that her echo is and beauty\u2019s sympathy.
Then let my notes pursue her scornful flight:
It shall suffice that they were breath\u2019d and died for her delight.
Amazon Affiliate links are used in this content.
Manual of Composition and Rhetoric edited by Gardiner, Kittredge and Arnold
Home Education by Charlotte Mason
Know and Tell by Karen Glass
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Writing to Learn by William Zinsser
Range by David Epstein
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