Fast Writing

One of the brightest students in the freshman Honors English class Lisa Cochran and I co-teach is a boy I'll call Harvey. Harvey is a terrific writer. His essays are detailed, fluent, grammatically correct, and full of insight and humanity. It's a pleasure to read them.

But Harvey has flunked our last two essay tests -- not because his writing was poor, but because they were timed tests, and he didn't finish either one. In the first, students had to write one-paragraph answers to four questions about A Separate Peace in 80 minutes. Harvey wrote two. In the second, they had to answer four questions about Lord of the Flies in 80 minutes, and Harvey managed to complete three.

We feel uncomfortable about what happened to Harvey, but we also feel stuck. Students need to learn to organize their thoughts and get them down on paper quickly. Why? Because that's one of the things they're asked to do on the NHEIAPs, New Hampshire's statewide test given to 3rd-, 6th- and 10th-graders. Later on, they'll have to do it on the SATs as well. Will they have to do it in college or on the job? Probably. We are a society obsessed with speed: Fast food, fast news, fast Internet connections, pedal to the metal! And like many other aspects of our society, this often goes directly against what we're trying to teach our students. Do a thorough job, we tell them. Don't rush -- think it out first. Read the instructions carefully. Go back and check your answers. Revise, revise, revise.

But we educators don't always practice what we preach. We race through lessons to "cover the material", we penalize late assignments, and we impose a killing pace on ourselves as well. I just finished reading The Gatekeepers, an inside look at how Wesleyan University chooses its freshman class. The admissions officers, who must read thousands of applications in a matter of weeks and reject three-quarters of them, tell themselves "Read fast, say no!" It reminded me of what I tell myself when I have to read, correct, and comment on 25 essays in a day or two -- read fast and say little.

Speed is almost always the enemy of good writing and good thinking. I spent 26 years writing for radio, TV, and magazines -- some of it on hourly deadlines -- and it was painfully clear that the less time I had to write, the less detailed, fluent, correct, and insightful the product turned out to be. But that¹s what our students have to do on the NHEIAPs, so tough luck, Harvey. Next time, don't write so well.