Writing it down

Michael Tan, PDI columnist, had two very interesting columns this week that send an important message to schools — writing being undervalued in the learning process, and how good handwriting enhances reading, language acquisition and critical thinking.

I agree with Michael Tan that writing is as important as reading in the learning process and more needs to be done in schools to hone the kids’ writing skills. We remember how excruciating it was to write essays, reports, reviews and exams when we were taking our master’s and Ph.Ds. We agree that a good grasp of language is necessary to thrive in school, and in life.

But we are skeptical that writing proficiency can be achieved with the extra two years in high school. He says that writing well comes with constant use, constant practice, with different skills that build up. In preschool, kids learn to write out letters, later they discover the wonders of putting the letters together into words, and words into sentences. They move into adventures of storytelling.

Then come term papers, written exams, book reports which students see more as a torture until later in life when they get to see that these are meant to connect hand and brain, training them to process ideas.

In my four decades of teaching, I will always remember the students who wrote very well – in their themes and book reports (when I was teaching English and Literature). In fact, I kept the best themes and written exams even when I no longer had them in class.

Then in my Asian History written exams, I still remember who answered well in the essay portion. Some of them already had a style in answering the exam – brief, concise.
Tan continues that writing challenges us to collect and organize our thoughts and to turn these into a form that can be stored and shared.

My college experience at STC can testify to this. Sister Delia Coronel, ICM in her Rhetoric class was so meticulous about the content and organization and no one could escape her because it was a required subject for all courses.

I was in her Shakespeare and Filipino Literature class and Contemporary Philippine History Class and it was indeed a torture but I just could not believe that my term papers in these three subjects were published in The Star, the school organ. My paper for Shakespeare was on The Great Fools in Shakespeare’s plays; for Filipino Literature, we were required to write two folk tales in our place that have never been published, and I wrote, “The White Horse of St. Catherine,” which was included in her “Stories and Legends from Filipino Folklore”, and about Leon Kilat.

Her admonition to always write our sources in anything we do still rings clear. Doing paperwork in the graduate school exposed me to different forms and styles according to the professors.

I will never forget Dr. Talisayon at the Asian Center who always required a two-page assignment or exam paper, more than that was not accepted. Prof. Perfecto who told me to review my outline and include something omitted in my paper on Debt for Nature Swap, The late Dr. Ma. Luisa Doronila wanted one short paragraph to answer the questions on the comprehensive exam on the basic courses. But there are several kinds of writing and this was evident in the town history project of the province from 2007 to 2010.

The task of choosing 55 persons to write the histories of the municipalities and component cities including the province and the Capitol was difficult. Many writers were chosen because of their experience as literary writers, columnists or contributors in local dailies or did research with NGOs. But the problem was the kind of writing needed was historical, and this posed a problem to the cluster editors.

Note-taking in school has declined in the past three decades. First, there were the photocopiers which meant students were less inclined to read and take notes by hand. Then came the Internet and Wikipedia, worsening the situation as students, and faculty took the easy way out of cutting and pasting rather than writing out notes. Worse, the cut-and-pasted material would then get passed on as an original work…this was plagiarism. Reading and note-taking force you to be more discerning, to choose texts which are relevant, and “send” them to your brain for processing.

When it’s time to share what you’ve learned from those handwritten notes, you have a stronger command of the information, knowing what to use, and how to present it. Keyboarding is important, but researches show that because we learn to type so rapidly, there’s less time to process ideas, make connections.

In note-taking, you take lots of notes, and they are handwritten, a habit picked up in school, in the pre-photocopying and pre-Internet era. Research, fieldwork develop note-taking skills where you observe, listen or interview. Listening to lectures and preparing the minutes of a committee meeting also require lots of note-taking. Tan stressed that in the 21st century, it’s not handwriting versus keyboarding.

For even if the computer keyboard seems so vital, we shouldn’t forget training children, and adults, to keep on writing by hand, We should worry at seeing students who just sit in class staring at the lecturer, and bringing out their phones from time to time to shoot a picture of what the lecturer has written on the whiteboard or blackboard, or slides on the PowerPoint presentation.

Research shows that “writing by hand probably also sharpens our thinking ability and skills, helping us to make sense of the world around us and to record, for our children and their children, the many marvels and miracles of the human conditions.”