RESPONSE :THE RIGHT TO GO BEYOND FORMULA

With sheltering in place and social distancing, my husband and I have not had any opportunities to eat out, share meals with friends or have people to our home. I've always cooked for our family, and I think I am a fair cook, but I've had one disaster after another with baking in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bread-baking has been my nemesis. I have always gotten great satisfaction out of baking homemade bread - even at one time baked my way through The Bread Bakers Apprentice cookbook. Since the epidemic, I haven't baked a decent loaf of bread. The problem? I have only been able to purchase instant yeast, and every recipe calls for active dry yeast. Not understanding the ratios of one to the other, I doubled the amount of yeast the first time, and when the ingredients were very dry, doubled the water. It was one sticky mess, and when baked, our sharpest knife could not pierce its crust! Another time, I did not notice ahead of time that the dough needed to sit 12 hours or overnight before baking. I had the dough mixed and was planning on it for dinner. After 6 hrs, I baked it anyway and ended up with another dense pancake.

Baking and writing. How are they linked? One has a recipe. Do we need a formula for the other? Is it safe to go outside the formula, or like baking, does that spell disaster? Spandel in The 9 Rights of Every Writer says that "formulaic writing will take our young writers to the upper limits of mediocrity...it is devoid of complexity, passion, surprise or art." Are we teaching our students to be better writers or to write so that we can easily correct and read what they have written? I have always found that when I didn't impose formula on my students, they wrote much more interesting essays...essays from the heart. Hillocks alleges that formula doesn't support higher thinking skills and actually stifles critical thought. (The Testing Trap:How State Assessments Control Learning. New York: Teachers College.)

How do we let go of formula and what do we replace it with? One way is to expose students to quality writing and have them imitate it. Flood your students with well-written pieces and have them analyze their structure. Where does the author place her thesis sentence? How is the piece organized? Look at sentence structure and length. What types of sentences are used? How does the piece conclude? Finally, have them write in the style of the author. Students can easily critique each other after having analyzed the example and attempted the style themselves. You will be surprised at how the quality of writing will improve in a short time. Authentic voices will emerge and creativity will show itself.

Begin by trying it yourself. Take a paragraph like this one from "The Elegant Eyeball," an essay by John Gamel.
They aren't what most people think they are. Human eyes touted as ethereal objects by poets and novelists throughout history are nothing more than white spheres, somewhat larger than your average marble, covered by a leather-like tissue known as sclera and filled with nature's facsimile of Jell-O. your beloved's eyes may pierce your heart, but in all likelihood they closely resemble the eyes of every other person on the planet. At least I hope they do, for otherwise he or she suffers from severe myopia (nearsightedness,  hyperopia (farsightedness), or worse.

Find an object to describe and then create similar sentences using your own experiences with the object. I used to do something similar with my 8th grade students when we were studying Langston Hughes' poem, "Mother to Son." Students would write their own versions from different points of view -  coach to player or father to daughter, etc. using the patterns of lines in the poem. Some great writing was created. More than that, students began to understand that there was no one way to write a poem. They began to think about and incorporate new elements into their own poems.

Unlike baking, it is when we go beyond the formula/recipe that delicious writing happens.