Bob Dandoy, who has taught high school and college composition in Western Pennsylvania for more than 30 years, still remembers the community college student who, upon being told she would have to write a 10-page research paper, got up, walked out and threw up.
Not all students so vividly display their anxieties about writing, but teachers can find plenty of examples of students who say they can't write, don't write or hate to write.
Yet outside of school, students and others are writing -- e-mails, Facebook entries, text messages, blogs, job letters, resumes and more.
Writing has become so ubiquitous that we are now living in the "Age of Composition," according to Kathleen Blake Yancey, past president of the National Council of Teachers of English and Hunt professor of English at Florida State University.
"Through writing, we participate -- as students, employees, citizens, human beings. Through writing, we are," she wrote in report called "Writing in the 21st Century," released Monday by the National Council of Teachers of English.
"I think we're conceiving of writing very differently than we did before. We're understanding writing takes place in lots of different environments and for lots of different purposes," Yancey said.
Dandoy agreed. "The old notions of pen and paper don't hold anymore," he said.
Yancey is fascinated by the varied ways the public is asked to write, whether it's to President Obama or to describe their bosses on Post-It notes on a kiosk at the Tallahassee Regional Airport.
She defines the switch this way: "We're moving from submission to participation."
Now, she said, "Writing curricula that are smart invite participation because that's what people want right now. Where you can invite participation, people stay engaged."
She thinks some schools try to erect a firewall between the writing students do outside of school and in school.
"It's just counterproductive," she said. "If kids have learned something about composing outside of school, a really interesting question is how can we connect to that?"
She thinks schools -- elementary, secondary and higher education -- are only about 20 percent of the way toward embracing this new understanding of writing.
That has to do with the fact that writing has traditionally been used as a form of punishment. Yancey recalls as a second-grader having to write "I will not stay out too long at recess" 100 times.
Also, writing has "historically and inextricably been linked to testing," Yancey wrote.
Blame that on Horace Mann, considered the father of American public education. In 1845, he urged teachers to test students not orally but on paper, which he viewed as fairer, the report stated.
Fast forward to high school and the anxiety over producing a 25-minute essay for the SAT college entrance exams. Many students, teachers and test-prep programs focus on writing a five-paragraph essay: a topic sentence, three supporting points and a conclusion.
While she doesn't address the five-paragraph essay in the report, Yancey said, "It's a faux task for a faux audience and everyone knows it.
"It's interesting that that world exists alongside the other world that's filled with participation, filled with meaning making, which is what writing has always been about."
(E-mail Eleanor Chute at echute(at)post-gazette.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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