I have already anticipated how my first permanent teaching situation in British Columbia had been a textbook demonstration of how fragile creative innovation in communication can be. I had encountered then two of the most capable English teachers I was ever to meet, and an approach to the teaching of writing which is still definitive for me thirty years later. It was an approach which, as I will argue, can still form an effective core technique for writing instruction in the current communications revolution.

Happily, my new mentors fleshed in the two major steps in teaching the mechanics of communication, beginning with Grade Ten: mastery of the expository paragraph, and the extension of the skills learned there into a book review format. My one achievement as a temporary teacher had been the development of a functional approach to the teaching of grammar, and the sophisticated writing techniques I was to learn at the new school complemented my early instinctive efforts nicely. My background for teaching composition had been influenced by my background in philosophy, which places a premium on the mechanics of conveying content. It may become clear as the account proceeds why the communications triad referred to can still form a viable strategy to counter functional illiteracy.

The value of grammar has been widely called into question in the past decades, not infrequently by people who do not understand it. I was fortunate to be aware of Paul Robert's work in functional grammar, and so grasped early the need to relate grammar to the business of transmitting ideas.

Jock grammar, as it can be styled in the intermediate grades, is a remorseless progress through the parts of speech found in standard textbook exercises. No rule is too trivial to be omitted. No definition is ever questioned, particularly since textbook exercises are always cooked to make the definitions fit. Teachers doggedly pursue every nuance of verb case, tense, and mood whether there is any point to the activity or not. At the end it becomes a moot point whether the boredom of it all will weigh more than the accumulation of isolated and bleeding facts.

The mindless pursuit of facts largely defeats teaching in any discipline, although it is better to memorize grammar in this way than to ignore it altogether, if only because some students (the natural readers, at any rate) will intuitively grasp how the language works, even if the teacher does not. But a functional approach will sweep much intellectual detritus aside, and link the study of grammar to effective writing skills.

My first discovery was that the reason students had trouble with grammar had something to do with an inflexible overreliance on definitions of parts of speech: ask students what nouns are and they will dully intone: the name of a person, place or thing. Such standard definitions do more to confuse matters than clarify them. This happens in part because historically English did not have a grammar, mainly because the early Anglo-Saxons had neglected the study of Latin. Some obscure scholar in an English public school (I have forgotten who) decided that this was a serious flaw, and set out to graft Latin grammar onto English.

The amazing thing is that Latin grammar fits as well as it does. But facility in English will never be more than wooden for most students if they rely on latinate grammar, and the first thing ore has to do is to insist that students concentrate on the fact that nouns are what nouns do, since the traditional definition fails to emphasize that a noun can as easily be a group of words as a single and naming word.

Understanding what nouns are requires knowing how they function with verbs. Nouns and verbs give us the first two building blocks, and there are in essence only two others: adjectives, which qualify or limit nouns, and adverbs, which do the same for verbs and adjectives. (Prepositions and conjunctions can be slipped in later as introducing word groupings functioning as one of the four basic types, in such a way that students will hardly notice). The key to understanding relationships between parts of speech lies in the function of clauses and phrases.

I will not pursue the foregoing in detail, since I am not concerned to provide a text in grammar. There are many good texts which will provide sentence exercises bearing on the four basic parts of speech, and on identifying clauses (a group of words containing a verb) and phrases (groups which do not contain a verb). The student should be able to identify clauses and phrases as nouns, adjectives and adverbs, since I am concerned here with the application to writing of these concepts.

Since normal English structure is only artificially described by our Latin-based grammar, a real understanding of it, as I happily discovered, is best served by choosing sentence examples at random from literature sources rather than from standard grammar texts. I expected students to exercise some imagination in describing how words were behaving in those sentences, and sentence parsing became a daily activity with my first students.

Understanding how the parts of speech are combined as groups of words into sentences requires some flexibility, and a feel for language. I can recommend Roberts, especially his Understanding Grammar, but there are a number of good texts around. The practice of parsing sentences, especially sentence diagramming from uncooked sources, soon proved to be a happy teaching device. It transformed grammar into a verbal chess game for the brighter students, who soon fell into heated debates about how to analyze normal English sentences as they are found in living use. The exercise proved so engrossing that students invariably suggested that we parse another sentence whenever there were a few spare moments at the end of a literature class. They even began to bring their own brain teasers from home.

No exercise that I am aware of since imparted a feel for the mechanics of sentence structure as well. In a matter of weeks the students were ready for the final step: writing sentences according to formulas. I would give them an instruction dreamed up on the spur of the moment: write a complex sentence with a noun phrase introduced by a preposition; write a compound-complex sentence with a subordinate adjective clause introduced by a participle; or, since a participle is a verbal adjective, and a gerund is a verbal noun, write a sentence in which a participle modifies a gerund. This sort of exercise can be tossed in at the end of a class for review, and once students can function smoothly with it there is nothing much left for them to learn in grammar. They will enjoy incentives to beat the teacher at his own game: I introduced the participle/gerund example by informing the students that, while I could think of examples, most of them were artificial. Could they do better? There will always be someone who can.

It would now be a rare beginning teacher, however, who will have enough background and enough confidence to try this way of building sentences and manipulating language through grammar. Most beginners, in fact, have so little background in grammar that they are willing to take the word of the advanced thinkers that grammar is useless. This is a pervasive pattern with language instruction: ignorance breeds sour grapes. If a teacher doesn't know how to go about teaching some aspect of communication, the temptation is to rationalize by discovering that the exercise is old-fashioned and pointless. The reply is that shaping groups of words into thoughts is no more pointless than rationality is. Indeed_, this skill defines rationality. This is why the failure of public education to deal with writing adequately is so damning.

Teachers equate freedom with the power to determine their own destiny in the classroom, subject only to very general limitations. Professionalism is seen to demand nothing less. That some specifics of classroom procedure in teaching writing should be spelled out for them seems intolerable. And yet teachers must be unique in this respect. An army would not leave a tank crew to find its own way with only the general directions teachers tolerate, nor would the most rigorous training in the details of how to proceed in given situations be seen as limiting. Rather, the more rigorous the training, the wider the freedom of the crew to adapt to battlefield conditions as they develop. The more rigorous the training in teaching specific exercises and skills, and the clearer the specifications of core assignments, the greater the freedom for the teacher in adapting to real people with real problems in real circumstances; in a word, he is freer to teach. No self-respecting tank commander would allow feelings of insecurity to deflect him from getting the job done, yet this is par for too many English classrooms.

Acceptance of such direction, however, amounts to conceding that public education can tackle functional illiteracy, and to conceding accountability for the failure to do so in the past. The educational establishment has gone to endless lengths for decades to avoid admitting just this.

The backbone of any serious writing program is the expository paragraph, which requires the concept of a main or controlling idea, and a key which limits what can be introduced as supporting data. There must be devices which hold the passage together and enable the reader to follow the ideas. I will not here bother to outline methods of development (logical, order of importance, comparison and contrast) nor transition devices (turn signals: Firstly...then again....to conclude), nor methods of gaining unity (repetition, clear pronoun reference, synonymous expressions). The communications teacher ought to be duly instructed in such things. What my new school added was an effective instruction technique: the committee marking system.

Group work is currently an educational fad, stressed mainly because of the alleged positive effects on student attitudes. In this sense, the committee marking system was decades ahead of its time. However, now group work may not require students to write. Democratic expression is all the rage; students are thought to be benefited by having choices: a paragraph if one wishes, unless a poster, a panel discussion, or a poem or group report is preferred. I have even known situations where there were no assignments, the better to avoid intimidating the young learner. Once the classroom door closes, it may be some years before even a hint gets out of what is/is not going on behind it.

Most fortunate high school English students can expect to write no more than three or four pieces in a semester: a descriptive paragraph perhaps, a character sketch or two, an editorial. These writing forms can be included in committee marking exercises, although only after the basic types of exposition have been covered.

Committee marking was intended to address one of the main obstacles to adequate instruction in composition: the marking load. Marking loads posed a problem even more critical in those days than now: spare periods for marking were all but unknown, and usually had to be spent supervising study class or the parking lot. The result could be drastic limitations in the number of assignments. Only later did I learn that having a clear department policy on writing did not prevent some in the privacy of the classroom from ignoring it.

The committee system was a teaching device which involved students in writing and evaluating exposition. It had to be preceded by a preparatory period of instruction in the mechanics of unity and coherence, and with a beginning of the sentence parsing exercises. I could assume at least some literacy, of course, and teachers now might have to resort to a mapping technique to help students draft main ideas and keys rather than relying solely on paragraph models to get them started. By October I was ready to begin. Every Friday students would bring a paragraph to class where it would be pooled with the other contributions from each row (six or seven students was common). Each row formed a marking group, with a chair and vice-chair. The chairs would collect the paragraphs from their row and pass them to another group.

The object was for each member of a group to evaluate the paragraphs passed to that group by assigning a mark out of ten. The vice-chairs would guard against bottlenecks by ensuring that paragraphs were moving smoothly between markers, and the chair would collect the marked paragraphs and average the six marks for each.

It was important that students marked for content rather than mechanics. The mark out of ten was supposed to be their judgment of the paragraph as a piece of writing, subject only to the requirement that it be of the requisite type (a comparison and contrast paragraph, if this was the focus that week). I discouraged students from error hunting, since some would be only too happy to cover a submission with red ink. Eventually a lesson would be put together of common errors in writing which were showing up, but marks would only be deducted for the "error of the week": run-on sentences, for example, if that were being highlighted. At the end of the month the students would hand in what they considered their best effort of the month, which was the paragraph I marked. I found that my mark differed very little from the averaged student grade.

While the first run through might have been a little frantic, students quickly got the hang of it and soon every Friday lesson taught itself. Each chairman would collect the paragraphs for his row after they had been returned, and the best two or three would be read out. (Nowadays technology would permit them to be projected). It was very easy for the teacher to be positive by emphasizing something in each case that the writer had done well. With five rows, then, at least ten winners could be discussed in class, complementing the one written paragraph and six which all had marked. Each student would then have had some seventeen examples pass before him, within one hour, of how the skill being taught had been implemented by his peers.

I have had nothing but frustration over the years since attempting to persuade teachers to experiment with this exercise. Some have used the excuse that they wanted to evaluate all student effort themselves, as if that were the least they should do as professionals. When pressed as to how many written pieces they had evaluated the previous semester, they might reply "two or three". Well, I came back, you can do that many with committee marking and expose students to dozens more in the process, and you won't have to prepare a lesson every Friday, which is a twenty-percent reduction in your preparation time!

This argument never got me very far. My object, as a librarian, was to set up the in-class essay, which will be described shortly, for the simple reason that the absence of a coherent writing program in a school will mean a slow death sentence for the library. The fact soon became apparent that a great many teachers did not pursue writing with any great enthusiasm, and certainly did not allot to it the forty percent of instruction time which was once customary. Consensus on the nature and importance of writing is rare among staffs, sometimes because marking can be so onerous or because teachers shrink from pursuing a skill which some students find disagreeable. Students will be less prone to complain if all teachers in the school place the same emphasis on written work. More fundamental still is the reluctance of teachers to place emphasis on an activity they have never been taught how to teach.

In the end, however, sharing common techniques and exercises means sharing common objectives and comparing notes. It allows others access to one's work, which violates the Compact. Objective results, therefore, may not compensate for what many teachers see as abandoning their professional Freedom, a freedom which becomes more precious in direct proportion to one's lack of confidence and the thinness of one's background in written communication .

C. The In-class Book Review--an ancient key to effective exposition

The culmination of training in functional grammar and in the evaluation of exposition by committee was the in-class book review. It is safe to say that the expository professional style book review is almost unknown now in high school communication teaching, yet there is much in its favour as a vehicle of instruction in writing.

For one thing, the book review is an excellent device to discourage the near universal tendency of students to plagiarize. Frustrated teachers, long fixated on the research essay, often besiege the librarian with requests either to track down passages they are sure have been copied, or even, of all things, to remove library resources (especially Coles or Baron's notes) from the shelves. In-class book reviews, based on a well-stocked library bibliography_, can avoid not only the standard popular selections for which Coles Notes have been prepared, but will also require student performances which can draw on such sources.

I even recommended Coles Notes, because the focus of a book review was on formal writing, rather than on trying to employ a catchy novel as a vain attempt to discover a magic wand which will ensure classroom tranquility by seducing students into reading. My students were expected to appear in class with a title page and a formal outline, and they had 60 minutes to produce 500 word essay. They needed all the help that they could get.

I have included an example of what I did then in Appendix A, which is an instructional handout given to my history students fifteen years after my initiation as a teacher of writing. My history students had not seen this kind of formal expository assignment before, nor had they apparently received instruction in expository writing in any systematic way. Since I could not, as a history teacher, digress to review and instruct my students adequately in the principles of composition, I resorted to giving them models by which they could pattern their work. Student models were the most useful (professional reviews seemed too remote) and I offered some commentary respecting unity and coherence. The model is an expository essay rather than merely a paragraph, but a sound training in paragraph writing will make the extension to the essay form a relatively simple matter.

The results were consistent over several semesters, and worth mentioning. Roughly nearly a third were graded fair to quite good, considering the circumstances, another third rather ordinary, and the remainder quite weak. Although the general level was not what I had been used to in the old days, I was still surprised at the level of writing I did get, for, as the librarian, I been long accustomed to hearing teachers cite reading and writing difficulties as an excuse for limiting library assignments. In fact, the results suggested that students were still teachable, and that my colleagues had not messed up as badly as was often feared. This was, in its way, doubly frustrating, for it confirmed my hunch that the public school system was capable, after all, of teaching effective communication--if it chose to make the effort.

What benefit will accrue to this added emphasis on writing? All of our students, even in a computer world devoid of books, will need to transmit ideas from Point A to Point B, and a book review will provide a vehicle for opinions to be formed, and conclusions drawn, in a manageable time frame. But we should not be so quick to assign books to oblivion, even if some studies have shown that only one adult in sixty reads a book after leaving high school. It is too soon to assume that we are fated to spend all of our lives in front of television sets or computers. It is still be legitimate to give all students access to the heritage of books, and at least a passive appreciation of the best that has been thought and said, if only to instill respect for a broad education. That should at least be a by-product of the teaching process. Students who acquire a reading habit will likely be the people who will wield best the power that goes with knowledge and literacy, and it will be important for schools to serve such individuals well. Here I emphasize only the aspect of data transmission, for which literacy is still essential, whatever the medium.

The student model in Appendix B will indicate just how useful the review format can be at the high school level. It is important for the teacher to assess student work on a holistic basis, (as the students needed to do when committee marking) concentrating on success in readability and clarity, while avoiding over-emphasis on mechanics. It is not necessary, for example, to provide a separate grade for the in-class essay outline and belabor excessively the mechanics of preparing it. It is there to provide the in-class student with a memory device, a crutch if you will, to jog memory and reduce panic. Some students will respond as if five hundred words would require reading War and Peace, but they soon appreciate the point that every one of their weekly paragraphs was close to half the length of the review. The student models can be used to make the same point.

I relied on this assignment for nearly twelve years, or all that portion of my career when I was not a full-time librarian. In all that time I can remember only two attempts by students to beat it. One student bravely tried to memorize an entire review for class, with disastrous results. Charitably, I gave him a 50 percent for effort. The other memorized some material from a novel flyleaf, and the smooth professional prose lasted for one paragraph, followed by incoherent garbage. 50 percent for pity. I rarely gave students less, feeling that a mark that mediocre is punishment enough, and unlikely to mislead an employer or educational institution into accepting the student on the basis of inflated academic credentials. Hopefully the poorer writer will have derived sufficient benefit from the paragraph program, and he will at least be able to escape from me with an English credit.

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For all the rewards the foregoing can provide, the problem is: its writing, and writing is work. And one has to know how to teach. Since teachers spend much of their careers ensuring that even their closest colleagues are never in a position to pass judgement on their performance in these respects, it is difficult to establish a writing program which requires that they all respect the spirit, and much if not all of the letter, of the approach.

In fact, the autonomy of individual teachers, while affording substantial insulation for a comfortable mediocrity, tends to isolate those who would rock the boat. There is no way to guarantee that superior methods or knowledge will be passed on to successors, who will enjoy the same autonomy if not the same ability. It requires more self-confidence than many possess to admit that they have something to learn about teaching writing, especially if this involves more than trivial adjustments in one's daily routines. While cross fertilization is intermittently possible, it tends not to occur, or at least will not become fixed, unless colleagues of more modest ability and ambition are comfortable with any proposed change. If an English department is diluted with imports who primary expertise lies elsewhere, as we have seen, a quality communications program is in trouble: ego and insecurity will be enhanced, and there is sure to be a reluctance to undertake the marking load a dedicated specialist will regard as necessary.

In the long run, there are too many ways for things to go wrong in a quality program. Most schools go through superior or inferior phases at various times as regards instruction in writing, but, the former tends to be unstable, since organizational realities ensure that things, sooner or later, will average out at mediocrity. Good teachers retire and move on, and they are not easily replaced. Potentially good teachers may thus lack mentors, even if they are open to guidance. Beginners, no matter how talented, will be resented, as I was, if they try to lead. It won't do to show up other teachers by expecting and getting more from students than they do, especially since they expect that their students will resent having to work harder than their peers in other classes. I got away with more strenuous standards for in History because fixed infantry positions are an easier sell than Polonius giving advice to Laertes. But I was still ignored and, finally, effectively exiled by my fellow professionals, the positive response of my students notwithstanding.

It will be claimed by some that I am branding my fellow professionals as incompetents. That charge cannot be taken seriously. We need not concern ourselves with the impact of incompetents in school systems, since dismissals on this ground are almost unknown in public education. The security blanket provided by the Compact is readily pierced only by sexual misconduct or chronic student misbehavior, incompetence being almost impossible to prove given the ability to go to ground within one's own four walls. I have known professionally irresponsible individuals, who should have been ashamed to collect their pay cheques, who could not have been said to be incompetent, since the imparting of useless subject matter is not one of the criteria.

Will an emphasis on formal writing cure functional illiteracy? I am satisfied that it will make a landmark contribution, and that the usual professional excuses for the shortfalls in public education, especially when they invoke class sizes, aspects of student behavior, or the impact of computer technology, cannot be allowed to be final. The public is right in sensing that something is wrong in our professional performance here. They are right in feeling frustrated in their inability to pin us down. We ought to be able to prove to anyone that, however negative circumstances complicate things, we are in fact doing the best we can under the circumstances. Proof means facing the problem openly and doing something about it, rather than letting turfs, insecurity and ego dictate our response.

The public would be damned fools to believe that educators will solve the problem even if classrooms were invariably made up of but one teacher, one log, one pupil. The analysis, and the courage to face the challenge, are simply not yet there. Only if we can free ourselves of the stifling Compact, and recognize what the insidious effect of the blind urge for turf, independence and survival has been, can we accomplish the task we are perfectly capable of doing. We are, after all, talking of only forty percent of a English teacher 's in-class routines. That even this much would provoke a hysterical reaction says something about the scale of the problem of change in education.