What started me on it was my interest in the trend in American schools and colleges called “writing across the curriculum,” whereby writing is no longer the sole possession of the English teacher but is an organic part of how every subject is taught. It’s an idea I like very much. It establishes at an early age the fact that writing is a form of thinking, whatever the subject. It also makes writing more appealing by enabling students to write about subjects that interest them and that they’re good at. The chemistry student who freezes at the mention of Shakespeare or Shelley can write surprisingly well about how oxidation causes rust—or could if anyone asked him to.

Note: WAC is unsiloing writing from English class

Location 33

every discipline has a literature—a body of good writing that students and teachers can use as a model; writing is learned mainly by imitation. Therefore I decided to look for the literature myself: to collect brief examples of good, accessible writing in a variety of academic disciplines. My hope was to demystify writing for the science types and to demystify science for the humanities types.

Note: Multi-disciplinary canon

Location 39

If the discipline was geology I wanted good writing by a geologist. If it was evolution I wanted Darwin, if it was relativity I wanted Einstein, if it was cell biology I wanted Lewis Thomas. 1 wanted to show that it’s not necessary to be a “writer” to write well. Clear writing is the logical arrangement of thought; a scientist who thinks clearly can write as well as the best writer. My book, in short, would be mainly an anthology—a guided tour of good writing in different crannies of the B.A. curriculum.

Note: Canon per BA course; imagine if you were assigned enjoyable essays instead of dry textbooks?

Location 43

I realized that my life had been a broad education and that I couldn’t write a book about learning without saying how much it has meant to me to be a generalist in a land that prefers narrow expertise. The anthology began to look suspiciously like a memoir.

Note: Education as generalist

Location 48

we write to find out what we know and what we want to say. I thought of how often as a writer I had made clear to myself some subject I had previously known nothing about by just putting one sentence after another—by reasoning my way in sequential steps to its meaning. I thought of how often the act of writing even the simplest document—a letter, for instance—had clarified my half-formed ideas. Writing and thinking and learning were the same process.

Note: Writing at first is an act of self-discovery and reasoning, and ends as a process of communication

Location 51

Once I met them, however, there was no mistaking the men and women I wanted to have along on the ride. They all had the rare gift of enthusiasm. Again and again I was struck by the exuberance that these writers brought to what they were writing about. Whoever the writer and whatever the subject—the biologist Rachel Carson writing about life on the ocean floor, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz writing about a cockfight in Bali, the art historian A. Hyatt Mayor writing about the lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec, the zoologist Archie Carr writing about the giant sea turtle, the psychiatrist Robert Coles writing about the gallantry of children under stress, the naturalist John Muir writing about an earthquake in Yosemite Valley, the composer Roger Sessions writing about Beethoven and the mystery of composition—the common thread is a sense of high enjoyment, zest and wonder. Perhaps, both in learning to write and in writing to learn, they are the only ingredients that really matter.

Note: Shared enjoyment, zest, wonder

Location 66

My favorite language was Latin. It transported me back to the classical world, and yet it was anything but dead—thousands of its roots were alive and well in English; in fact, no subject has been more useful to me as a writer and an editor. I took Latin for three years at Deerfield until there were no more courses left to take, finally getting beyond Caesar’s dreary wars and Cicero’s prim orations to Virgil’s Aeneid and Horace’s odes, finally discovering that the wonderful language also had a wonderful literature.

Note: Relevance of Latin

Location 95

Contrary to general belief, writing isn’t something that only “writers” do; writing is a basic skill for getting through life. Yet most American adults are terrified of the prospect—ask a middle-aged engineer to write a report and you’ll see something close to panic. Writing, however, isn’t a special language that belongs to English teachers and a few other sensitive souls who have a “gift for words.” Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly—about any subject at all.

Note: Universal fear of writing

Location 184

One spring day in 1985 I got a telephone call from a professor named Thomas Gover at Gustavus Adolphus College, a small liberal arts college of Lutheran origins in St. Peter, Minnesota. He wanted to tell me about a new program at his college tha he thought would interest me. It did. In fact, it’s what got me thinking about this book. He said that in the fall term Gustavus Adolphus would launch a curriculum in which seventy-five courses, covering the entire spectrum of a baccalaureate education, would be listed with a “W,” meaning that writing would be a required part of the course, that it would be a factor in the student’s grade, and that the teachers would work with the students on the process of organizing, writing and rewriting their papers and reports. Three “W” courses would be required for graduation. The call crystallized an idea I realized I felt strongly about: that the teaching of writing should no longer be left just to English teachers but should be made an organic part of every subject. The idea, which goes by the name of “writing across the curriculum,” has been very much in the air among educators for at least a decade. But I had never heard of any school or college actually trying it. (I’ve since heard of many.) That’s why the call from Minnesota excited me. It was a chance to see the idea in action and to find out whether it was as important a trend as I thought it was.

Note: 75 options, pick 3

Location 198

Gover asked if I would like to come out to Gustavus Adolphus and talk to the students about writing. I said I would like to come out and talk to the professors; they were the real heroes of the mission. How were they going to undertake a kind of teaching they had never tried before? How were they going to adapt writing to their discipline? How did they think writing would help their students to learn?

Note: Challenge for teachers

Location 208

English teachers. Under the American system, they are the people who teach our children to write. If they don’t, nobody will. They do it with dedication, and I hope they’ll be rewarded, if not here on earth, at least in heaven, for there’s almost no…

Note: Challenge of teaching

Location 214

it’s not what most English teachers want to do. Their real subject is literature—not how to write, but how to read: how to extract meaning from a written text. That’s what they were primarily hired to teach and what they were trained to teach. Inevitably, much of the writing that English teachers assign is based on literature—on what somebody else has already written—and therefore has little reality And what students in turn write for the English teacher is more florid than what they would write for anybody else. They reach for a “literary” style that they think the teacher wants and that they assume is “good English.” But this style is no part of who they are. Nor is it necessarily good English;…

Note: Fusion of literature trading and composition a mistake. Composition should be its own “studio” which is the center, the unifying element across classes

Location 218

Motivation is crucial to writing—students will write far more willingly if they write about subjects that interest them and that they have an aptitude for. But they don’t often get that chance; writing tends to be assigned only in…

Note: Points to the need for writing to be owned by an outside, cross-class “studio”

Location 225

Another is that the essence of writing is rewriting. Very few writers say on their first try exactly what they want to say. Recently I got a form letter from my cable TV company saying, “Next month we will upgrade our phones, so it will be difficult to reach us.” A few days later I saw an interoffice memo from a supervisor requesting “a list of all employees broken down by sex.” Meaning is remarkably elusive. After a lifetime of writing I still revise every sentence many times and still worry that I haven’t caught every ambiguity; I don’t want anyone to have to read a sentence of mine twice to find out what it means.

Note: Revision

Location 243

H. L. Mencken said that “0.8 percent of the human race is capable of writing something that is instantly understandable.” He may have been a little high.

Note: Joke stat, but speaks to mass inability to compose

Location 248

Only lately has there been an important shift. The shift—in the terminology of the trade—is from “product” to “process.” It puts the emphasis where it should have been all along: on the successive rewritings and rethinkings that mold an act of writing into the best possible form. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself.

Note: Both matter

Location 253

in the national furor over “why Johnny can’t write,” let’s not forget to ask why Johnny also can’t learn. The two are connected. Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know—and what we don’t know—about whatever we’re trying to learn. Putting an idea into written words is like defrosting the windshield: The idea, so vague out there in the murk, slowly begins to gather itself into a sensible shape. Whatever we write—a memo, a letter, a note to the baby-sitter—all of us know this moment of finding out what we really want to say by trying in writing to say it.

Note: What we know and don’t, and a question that we care about answering

Location 255

We formed a writing committee that consisted of professors from many different disciplines, and we invited proposals for ‘W’ courses from the entire faculty. The response was instantaneous. As soon as the ownership of writing by the English department was lost, people in other fields said, ‘I’d be willing to give it a try.’ The procedure is that they have to submit a proposal and the writing committee has to approve it. To help them we’re bringing in outside experts to give workshops in how to teach writing. One reason for the high response is that everything is voluntary. If the program had been imposed by the administration I don’t think it would work.”

Note: Voluntary committees?

Location 275

Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow. Writing was such an avenue—perhaps, in fact, the main route.

Note: The examples he gave are about historical reading in any field. Would students write essays on that? I feel like a better approach is to write about questions and cross-disciplinary questions related to your field?

Location 299

Reasoning is a lost skill of the children of the TV generation, with their famously short attention span. Writing can help them get it back.

Note: An old and simplified argument

Location 340

At the college I spent two days talking with professors who would be teaching “W” courses in the fall. Their disciplines covered the gamut of a liberal education—everything from art history and computer science and engineering to ethics and philosophy and theater. All of them were excited at the prospect of making writing a component of their course. But they still didn’t quite know how they were going to do it. We discussed possible approaches, and I mentioned how strongly I believe that writers learn by imitation. I asked the professors if they knew any examples of what they considered good writing in their field. They all did. A professor of mathematics said she knew of many elegant proofs. Two physics professors said that Einstein’s theory of relativity was a marvel of lucid exposition. Other professors recalled other models they admired. I urged them to make copies of those models for their students. Writing, I reminded them, can’t be taught or learned in a vacuum. We must say to students in every area of knowledge: “This is how other people have written about this subject. Read it; study it; think about it. You can do it too.” In many subjects, students don’t even know that a literature exists—that mathematics, for instance, consists of more than right and wrong answers, that physics consists of more than right or wrong lab reports.

Note: This feels like a secondary strategy confused for a main one. Yes, it helps. But reading about Einstein’s writing is not going to help you through elementary physics. Sounds he’s saying to shift from domain-specific textbooks to domain-specific essays—great. But young students shouldn’t feel the onus of using writing to make great inventions! It’s more about personal curiosities and questions. Why should I study this? How might X apply to a situation in life or culture? How was this invented? What would life be like if it weren’t invented? What is currently unanswered about X? How was society changed by X? What parts of everyday life are made possible by X? How might X be useful in the future? It’s less about writing as original research, and using the subject itself as a microcosm to off cross-disciplinary avenues of thinking that all tie back to your own unfolding, development, and quest for purpose. [e]

Location 347

I never stopped to ask, “Who is the typical Yale alumnus? Who am I editing for?” One of my principles is that there is no typical anybody; every reader is different. I edit for myself and I write for myself. I assume that if I consider something interesting or funny, a certain number of other people will too. If they don’t, they have two inalienable rights—they can fire the editor and they can stop reading the writer. Meanwhile I draw on two sources of energy that I commend to anyone trying to survive in this vulnerable craft: confidence and ego. If you don’t have confidence in what you’re doing you might as well not do it.

Note: Anti audience adjusting

Location 378

Fuzzy thinking turned up repeatedly as the main enemy. “Students don’t know how to be precise,” said Norman Walbek, associate professor of political science. “In my first assignment I asked them to write a paper on ‘What are the most important goals of United States policy?’ It was a values statement—something nobody had ever asked them to write before; usually students are only asked to describe or to analyze: ‘Write an essay on the Declaration of Independence.’ Well, their papers were a disaster. They rambled all over. They couldn’t formulate a goal or a policy except in the most generalized way—‘better communications,’ ‘world peace’—and in almost every case the comment I found myself making was: ‘I don’t understand this.’ As the term went on I tried to get them to use writing to focus their thoughts on specific ideas and issues. I told them I’d be grading their papers for clarity, common sense, logic, plausibility and precision, not for the content of their views. At the end of the term I gave them the same assignment on goals and policies. This time their papers were clear and explicit. Their problems were in thinking, not in the mechanics of writing.”

Note: Challenge when students are both poor thinkers and writers

Location 632

“Back when some of us were concerned about why Johnny can’t write,” Professor McRostie told me, “a psychologist put it to us that Johnny can’t reason, and I’ve been preoccupied with that thought ever since. The first two books I assigned last term were The Art of Thinking, by Vincent Ruggiero, and Reasoning, by Michael Scriven. This is a generation that has spent fifteen thousand hours watching television, and its attention span is short. I’m challenging my students to find their powers of reasoning. I tell them, ‘If you don’t write reasonably and well on your exam I’ll give you a lower grade. But I’ll also give you extra time if you need it.’ At the end of the term, when they were asked to evaluate the course, they said that the writing component had been an important part of their learning.”

Location 644

Professor McRostie had me beat as a logic nut, and his credentials were better. I had merely learned by experience that thinking is the foundation of writing. But I had never thought about thinking as a process. How does it work? Why do some people think straighter than others? What are the factors that prevent us from thinking clearly? Can it be taught? I made a note to buy The Art of Thinking when I got back home. I suspected that it would help me to see how so much fuzz gets into the writing machinery and how some of it might be kept out.

Note: Patterns of logic

Location 653

“An idea can have value in itself, but its usefulness diminishes to the extent that you can’t articulate it to someone else. What the writing program made me realize is that I have to take much more time in class to talk about writing. Teachers have a tremendous tendency to just give writing assignments and let their students sink or swim—which assumes that they’ve learned to write somewhere else. Very often they haven’t. In history we’ve paid great lip service to the need to write, but we haven’t taken the time in our classes to tell students how it’s done. We need to rob time from the study of history to do that. It takes a commitment, and I found it very painful because the term is too short anyway to cover all the historical issues I’d like to discuss.”

Note: Burden of teaching writing in every class

Location 657

See Johnny reason! Watch him make a wrong turn! Follow his cogitations as he wonders what to do next! I thought of all the subjects where the teacher never gets this inside look, where students are graded solely on the basis of a right or a wrong answer. I don’t only mean hard sciences, like physics, that deal in numerical answers. The humanities and the social sciences also rely heavily on tests that measure a student’s learning by what he knows, not by how he got to know it: multiple-choice exams and “short-answer questions.” Economics, for example, is a discipline that rests finally on numbers and projections and probabilities—“answers,” as they might be loosely called. But the future economist should be as accountable as the future chemist for describing the steps that took him to his numerical result, and the economics teacher should be no less eager to read about the trip.

Note: How to make process legible at scale

Location 682

No such transfer takes place. Writing teachers are lucky if 10 percent of what they said in class is remembered and applied. The bad habits are just too habitual. They can be cured only by that most painful of surgical procedures: operating on what the writer has actually written. Only there, where a writer is at his most vulnerable, having put some part of himself on paper, does he make the connection between principle and practice. The operation is almost as hard on the teacher. Like the parent who tells the spanked child that “this hurts me more than it hurts you,” the writing teacher wants nothing so much as a paper that’s well written—one that won’t mire him in endless repairs and emotional debris. I sometimes find myself emitting small moans as I start to read a paper and realize the magnitude of the problems ahead.

Note: Editing and feedback as the real vector of change

Location 693

would anyone in his right mind want to be a writing teacher? The answer is that writing teachers aren’t altogether in their right mind. They are in one of the caring professions, no more sane in the allotment of their time and energy than the social worker or the day care worker or the nurse. Whenever I hear them talk about their work, I feel that few forms of teaching are so sacramental; the writing teacher’s ministry is not just to the words but to the person who wrote the words. One of my hopes for writing across the curriculum is that teachers in many fields will discover this transaction. Through the writing of our students we are reminded of their individuality. We are reminded, whatever subject we are charged with teaching, that our ultimate charge is to produce broadly educated men and women with a sense of stewardship for the world they live in.

Note: Feedback as psychotherapy and parenting

Location 699

Where does writing figure in all this? Writing is a tool that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with facts and ideas. It’s a physical activity, unlike reading. Writing requires us to operate some kind of mechanism—pencil, pen, typewriter, word processor—for getting our thoughts on paper. It compels us by the repeated effort of language to go after those thoughts and to organize them and present them clearly. It forces us to keep asking, “Am I saying what I want to say?” Very often the answer is “No.” It’s a useful piece of information.

Note: Physical process of ideas into frozen shareable meaning

Location 724

“It gets them to write for their peers and not for the teacher,” he told me, “and what they learned was a revelation to them. They learned by the presence or absence of response to what they had written. The good paper raised all the right questions, and on those days the paper would teach the class. The poor paper was instantly noticeable. There wouldn’t be much in it to discuss—there’d be no place to start, or it was so unclear that we’d have to go back over it and try to figure out what it was about. It made everybody in the class realize that a piece of writing is a piece of thinking. By the end of the term all the students said how much better they understood a subject by having to write about it.”

Note: Opening question loops

Location 738

Students were told to read a chapter on the “dependence effect” from John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society and then to read a rebuttal by Friedrich von Hayek, called “The Non-Sequitur of the Dependence Effect.” (Both are in an anthology called Ethical Theory in Business.) “What I particularly pointed out,” Professor Paul said, “was the elegance of von Hayek’s argument. It’s elegant in the sense of a geometric argument: Everything that needs to be there is there, and the essay has nothing in it that doesn’t support the argument. I also emphasized to the students how short von Hayek’s answer is.

Note: Geometry to each pattern

Location 745

In this country the English major has always been defined almost entirely in terms of literature and literary analysis, and therefore English department writing has a strong literary bias. In fact, the teaching of writing has only recently been incorporated in graduate English programs. Our education as English teachers never prepared us to do that.

Note: Literature bias

Location 763

I tried to show them that science has a fine literature of its own. I got them reading the essays of Victor Weisskopf and books like Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey, Stephen Jay Gould’s Ever Since Darwin and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”

Note: Canon of technical essays and books

Location 769

asked Professor Brew what he thought of the “comp/lit” double grade that many English departments use to distinguish between how a paper is written and what it says. “I don’t approve of it,” he told me, “because it emphasizes the split. Writing is not divisible.” I was greatly cheered to hear this truth affirmed by a professor of English. Professors of English are by no means unanimously delighted to see “their” subject—writing—parceled out to teachers beyond the tribal walls. Chemistry teachers! Geography teachers! Many English teachers would rather hold on to the keys. Why, they ask, can’t they correct a chemistry paper for its writing and let the chemistry teacher correct it for its chemistry? The answer, of course, is that an act of writing is an act of thinking—an organic compound, as the chemists would say. There’s little point in having a teacher clean up the messy syntax in a chemistry paper if he can’t also clean up the messy chemistry. The indivisibility of language is what gives writing its authority and its majesty. Lewis Thomas writes eloquently about cell biology because in his bones he is a cell biologist. That he also happens to be a good writer is a bonus.

Note: Disagree.

Location 771

The artist Paul Klee once told his students that “art is exactitude winged by intuition.” I like that equally as a definition of good writing. One of the things I enjoy about Klee is his willingness to be surprised during the creative process by an antic idea. Paintings that might have been cold because of their exactitude are animated by humor, nonsense and whim. Klee’s humanity keeps jumping out of his material; I feel connected not only to the artist but to the man, especially because so much of the nonsense makes sense.

Note: Intuition and exactitude

Location 802

Therefore, for the purposes of this book, I’ll generalize outrageously and state that there are two kinds of writing. One is explanatory writing: writing that transmits existing information or ideas. Call it Type A writing. The other is exploratory writing: writing that enables us to discover what we want to say. Call it Type B. They are equally valid and useful.

Note: Type a vs. b (essays)

Location 811

We are a society paralyzed by the inability to convey routine information—the inability of the executive to explain company policy in a memo to the staff, of the employee to explain his new idea in a proposal to the boss, of the bank to explain its “simplified” new bank statement to the customer, of the manufacturer to explain in a consumer manual how its product works, of the health and insurance professions to explain in a brochure how to get reimbursed for being sick, of the educator to explain in a letter how the school is educating our children, of the Internal Revenue Service to explain on its new tax form how to fill it out. Type A writing is what most people need to get through the day, both as writers and as readers. Its sole purpose is to inform; it has no deeper content that the writer will discover in the act of writing.

Note: Type A automated by AI

Location 814

writers begins with one word: Think! Ask yourself, “What do I want to say?” Then try to say it. Then ask yourself, “Have I said it?” Put yourself in the reader’s mind: Is your sentence absolutely clear to someone who knows nothing about the subject? If not, think about how to make it clear. Then rewrite it. Then think: “What do I need to say next? Will it lead logically out of what I’ve just written? Will it also lead logically toward where I want to go?” If it will, write the sentence. Then ask yourself, “Did it do the job I wanted it to do, with no ambiguity?” If it did,…

Note: Type a simplified process

Location 820

Type B writing—exploratory writing—requires no such cogitation, no prior decisions about which road to take; the road will reveal itself. Today many of America’s best writing teachers believe that this is the only kind of writing worth teaching, especially to young children. Unlike Type A writing, which they consider mainly a technical skill, Type B writing is a voyage of discovery into the self. Only by going into uncharted territory, they feel, can a writer find his potential and his voice and his meaning. Meaning, in fact, doesn’t exist until a writer goes looking for it. I don’t entirely buy that theory because I think both types of writing are necessary for survival and fulfillment. But I like the humanism behind it—the idea that writing is a means of growth and that it should never be without elements of joy and wonder. Nor do I think Type B writers are exempt from the laws of grammar and…

Note: Type B as a search mechanism

Location 826

One of the most helpful books I’ve read recently is Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life, by Jeremy Campbell. It’s the story of “information theory,” a science that wasn’t born until World War II but whose laws have governed us since the first grunt. I bought Grammatical Man because I had begun to think of writing across the curriculum as a vast information system, and I remembered the stir the book caused at the Book-of-the-Month Club when it was published in 1982. We offered it because several of our editors were crazy about it—which is the best possible reason. The book is not only interesting; it’s a model of linear writing, leading the reader across rocky new terrain in steps of clarity and logic. Jeremy Campbell never fails to ask: “What would a novice need to know next? How can I explain it in the way that would be easiest to grasp?”

Note: Writing as information system

Location 852

Thus information emerged as a universal principle at work in the world, giving shape to the shapeless, specifying the peculiar character of living forms and even helping to determine, by means of special codes, the patterns of human thought. In this way, information spans the disparate fields of space-age computers and classical physics, molecular biology and human communication, the evolution of language and the evolution of man. Evidently nature can no longer be seen as matter and energy alone. Nor can all her secrets be unlocked with the keys of chemistry and physics, brilliantly successful as these two branches of science have been in our century. A third component is needed for any explanation of the world that claims to be complete. To the powerful theories of chemistry and physics must be added a late arrival: a theory of information. Nature must be interpreted as matter, energy, and information.

Note: Matter, energy, information

Location 866

the recurring themes of Grammatical Man is the need to protect the integrity of the message. In information parlance, the enemy is “noise”—a perfect word for all the random interferences with what man or nature is trying to say. Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page and the caption that doesn’t quite explain what’s happening in the picture. Noise is handwriting that’s hard to read. Noise is distortion on the TV screen. Noise is the lapse of memory, the slip of the tongue, the wrong neuron fired by the brain—anything that brings disorder to the intended order of a message. So pervasive is noise, disorder being such a strong natural force, that nature has evolved an infinite number of backup systems for getting messages to their destination “more or less in the original form,” as Campbell puts it. “In nearly all forms of communication, more messages are sent than are strictly necessary to convey the information intended by the sender.” Certainly writing is one of the main endeavors where disorder is more common than order. Murphy’s Law, which says that if something can go wrong it will, applies to the average sentence almost as inexorably as a law of physics. If you want a law of physics, I can commend (thanks to Grammatical Man) the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the tendency of energy is to decay in usefulness—a change for the worse known as entropy. I found it consoling after all these years to learn that writers are up against nothing less than the fundamental anarchy of the universe; entropy, prince of disorder, is sprinkling noise on everything we write. Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise. Pomposity is noise. Clutter is noise: all those unnecessary adjectives (“ongoing progress”), all those unnecessary adverbs (“successfully avoided”), all those unnecessary prepositions draped onto verbs (“order up”), all those unnecessary phrases (“in a very real sense”). Information is your sacred product, and noise is its pollutant. Guard the message with your life.

Note: Bad writing produces noise around the signal

Location 874

One of its essays, “Science and Literature,” has this to say about obscurity: In the eighteenth century obscurity was regarded as a disfigurement not merely of philosophic and scientific but also of theological prose. To conceal meaning (it was reasoned) is equally to conceal lack of meaning…. But even in those enlightened days the appeal of obscurity was clearly recognized. Of Dryden, Johnson said that “he delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle.” Don’t we all, up to a point? We all recognize a voluptuary element in the higher forms of incomprehension and a sense of deprivation when matters which have hitherto been mysterious are now made clear. The rhetorical use of obscurity, however, is a vice…. If the text is made hard to follow because of non sequiturs, digressions, paradoxes, impressive-sounding references to Gödel, Wittgenstein and topology, “in” jokes and a general determination to keep all vulgar sensibilities at bay, then we shall have great difficulty in finding out what the author intends us to understand. We shall have to reason it out therefore, much as we reasoned out a passage in some language we didn’t fully understand. In both texts some pretty strenuous reasoning may be interposed between the author’s conceptions and our understanding of them, and it is strangely easy to forget that in one case the reasoning was the author’s but in the other case our own. We have thus been the victims of a confidence trick. In all territories of thought which science or philosophy can lay claim to, including those upon which literature has also a proper claim, no one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.

Location 901

Probably the most engaging advice on obscurity comes from E. B. White, in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, a book every writer should read once a year. “Although there is no substitute for merit in writing,” White says, “clarity comes closest to being one. Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, ‘Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!’”

Location 917

“So what is mathematics?” I asked, still hoping for a definition. “What are any of the disciplines but a way in which people try to make sense of the world or the universe?” she said. “Mathematics is one way of doing that, just as literature is, or philosophy, or history. Math does it by looking for patterns and abstracting—that is, by examining a specific case and generalizing from that. But that’s not how a child would define mathematics. He’d say that math is arithmetic—adding and subtracting and multiplying and dividing—because that’s the first thing we make him do. We spend far too much time on it; today we’ve got calculators that can do the job faster and better. I don’t think we should even teach long division anymore; kids spend so much time learning to do it, and getting it wrong, that they never see the point of it—why you would want to do it. But with a calculator doing the drudgery, you can ask an interesting question, like ‘How much fabric do I need to cover this chair?’”

Note: Math generally is making generalization out of specific observations; though a student of math is mostly learning and internalizing generalities; rarely do they find a unique pattern; but the writers whole project is turning novel experiences into general conclusions.

Location 2131

“So from the start I got my students to write about what they were doing. My first idea was to ask them to write mathematics autobiographies. That’s when I realized there was some amazing stuff in their heads. They had very specific memories of their classroom experiences. It wasn’t just: ‘I don’t like math’; it was: ‘In the middle of the third grade when Miss Thompson made me do that sheet with the 100 additions I felt terrible because I couldn’t get it right.’ They conveyed a strong sense of what it was like to be in a math classroom. Many of them told wonderful stories; in fact, some of the kids who were most enthusiastic weren’t particularly good at math. What those autobiographies did was to remind me that I wasn’t teaching empty vessels—that these people had long histories of mathematics even though they were only thirteen. I saw that it was possible for me to be in touch with them.”

Note: Autobiography on the subject

Location 2152

Another format is for students to keep a journal with a running account of their work. “In a journal,” Mrs. Countryman said, “I want them to suspend judgment—to feel free to ask questions, to experiment, to make statements about what they do and don’t understand. At first they need help to learn to write without censoring their thoughts—to feel confident that nobody will criticize what they’ve written.”

Note: Journal of progress

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“There’s no dearth of topics for math papers,” she said, “but often students seem to be just meeting an assignment instead of pursuing a genuine interest of theirs. I’m always looking for a connection between mathematics and social questions. Recently in my twelfth-grade calculus class the lesson was on exponential functions, and I wanted to find an example of exponential growth that would make sense to the kids. One method that we have in math is to construct a mathematical model that uses exponential functions. It enables you to get at all kinds of world problems.”

Note: Tie into social problems

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A similar problem that I gave my class was this: Suppose every family in China was allowed to have children until they had a son. What effect would that have on population growth, and would it change the proportion of males and females in the country? The result was very surprising. The students not only wrote their way through the mathematics of exponential growth; they raised many interesting side issues of economics and agriculture and social structure. One girl pointed out that no Chinese boy would ever have a brother.”

Note: Social question first that has a math concept implicit to come to a conclusion

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I asked Joan Countryman whether the new technology of computers could knock this barrier down. “That’s one of the things that got me thinking about writing,” she said. “In the face of so much new technology, math teachers are starting to have to rethink what they do. For instance, all that algebra we used to spend weeks teaching—factoring and quadratic equations—is available today on a little piece of software that a school can buy for less than fifty dollars. I don’t think you can make a case for teaching quadratic equations anymore; 95 percent of the general population can’t solve them anyway. Instead you can give your class a problem that requires a quadratic equation and let the machine solve the equation. That liberates you to think about what makes the problem interesting and what its ramifications are. In the past, kids spent all their time figuring out how to do the equation.

Note: Focus on ramifications, not just memorization or calculating

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There were teachers at the conference from states like Nebraska and Rhode Island and Washington, which had a mandate from the board of education to do writing across the curriculum, and the math teachers were resisting it because they didn’t know what the writing might be. So they said, ‘Tell us more—what are you doing?’ I went home and wrote a paper called ‘Writing to Learn Mathematics,’ which is just a set of ideas about the kind of things you can do, and that led to all these workshops.”

Note: Find paper [r]

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One place they can go is into other disciplines, I suggested to Joan Countryman. “Obviously one of the things you’re after is to break down the compartments between different subjects.” “I try to do that a lot,” she said. “The tradition is that there should be a connection between math and what we call science. Actually, in most schools, math and science teachers don’t have anything to do with each other. But in many fields there’s a natural crossover. Philosophy, for instance. I co-teach an introductory course in philosophy with the woman who’s head of our classics department. One thing I did was to read Euclid with the class, which normally isn’t part of philosophy. It turned out that it was very useful to the kids because Euclid’s style, which was to make propositions and derive theorems from them, was adopted by many later philosophers, like Spinoza. We’ve had a good time playing around with that, trying to figure out what some of the connections are. The kids were startled by it.”

Note: Philsophy, science, history, literature of X; any discipline X can be explored through all the other disciplines

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“This year I got braver,” she explained to me, “and decided to have everybody just do free writing at the beginning of every class. ‘Check your editor at the door,’ I told them. ‘You can write about anything as long as you’re willing to have me see what it is.’ What they write doesn’t have to be about math, but half the time it is: ‘Why does this formula function? What does this pattern of numbers mean?’ Or it might be about one of their other subjects: ‘Here’s a physics experiment I tried that didn’t come out right.’ They seem to want to know what’s going on inside their heads—what their learning styles are—and that’s something I’m eager for them to know.

Note: A journal at the beginning of class, structure for free writing

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But it also turns out to do other things: it’s a way of clearing the palate. Kids come into the classroom with all this other stuff in their heads. If they write it down for ten minutes they become much more available for whatever it is we want to do in the class. One of my colleagues worries that if she does this she’ll get less teaching done because every class will be ten minutes shorter, but it doesn’t seem to work out that way.”

Note: In class journaling as release valve

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Mrs. Countryman drew a triangle on the blackboard and told the class she wanted them to determine the size of its three angles. But she gave them none of the information they would need—for instance, the length of the sides. “I want you to write how you might go about solving this problem when you do get more information from me,” she said. The students wrote for about five minutes. They looked like writers—they were thinking hard and laboriously putting sentences on paper and crossing out sentences that obviously didn’t express what they were thinking, perhaps because their thinking kept changing as they wrote and discovered what they really thought. They even sounded like writers; I heard the scratching out of words that is the obbligato of a writer’s life. After that some of them were asked to read what they had written. The papers were all brief journeys in logic: if I knew this I’d be able to find out that; what I need to determine is a, so the best method to use is probably x and y. Writing and thinking and learning had merged into one process. The class was off to a good start, and when it got down to actual mathematics—when the students were given the length of the sides and began to do some calculating—they were working from a common understanding of how the problem should be approached. They threw numbers and suppositions and probabilities into the room until they got the first of the three angles, and the rest was easy. Joan Countryman’s part in all this had been to coax scraps of information out of the students until the pieces formed themselves into the right answer. I never felt that she was the owner of that answer. I almost had the feeling that she didn’t know it herself; the answer was just there waiting to be found by all of them. What I did feel was that I was watching a very good teacher.

Note: Involving kids in process vs. lecturing

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Tearing myself away from Albert Einstein—a parting I never imagined would be sweet sorrow—I’ll add a final plea to all scientists and science students: Go, and do thou likewise. Follow Einstein’s example and Thoreau’s advice (“Simplify! Simplify!”). Reduce your discipline—whatever it is—to a logical sequence of clearly thought sentences. You will thereby make it clear not only to other people but to yourself. You will find out whether you know your subject as well as you thought you did. If you don’t, writing will show you where the holes are in your knowledge or your reasoning.

Note: Explain a process, summarize

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Summing up her principles of writing to learn, Professor Meislich says: “Multiple-choice questions are very popular ways of testing knowledge, especially in classes with large numbers of students. However, a more complete understanding is demonstrated by the ability to explain. From the written explanations we get a better idea of the depth of the students’ understanding. We can also learn about their possible misconceptions. Thus, written communication becomes an integral part of the course in a very direct way, with rapid feedback and the opportunity to correct errors in a nonpunitive manner.

Note: Why is it true? Why is it false? How would you know? Why is it so?

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“I believe that writing is an effective means of improving thinking skills because a person must mentally process ideas in order to write an explanation. Writing also improves self-esteem because mentally processed ideas then belong to the writer and not just to the teacher or the textbook author.”

Note: Writing is the ability to convert a 3D thought into 2D; explain why some can speak better than they can write

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Teachers of writing are dismally aware of the inclination of writers to equate the worth of their writing with the worth of who they are. The equation goes: “You think this is a terrible paper, therefore you must think I’m a terrible person.” The thought is natural, perhaps almost inevitable: when we write we put some part of our self on paper for other people to judge. But finally that thought is a self-indulgence. Writers who think they are being criticized when only their writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher’s reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight. Do I hear a gasp? How dare I compare writing to plumbing? I dare. Both of them are crafts, with their own set of tools, which will do the jobs they were designed to do if they are used correctly.

Note: Oversimplified, what about personal writing? Even if there are technical editing techniques for personal essays, and that cutting an experience doesn’t make it invalid, it’s not unreasonable for a new writer to take this personally.

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