Columnist Susan Snyder: Students need to take write turn

Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2003 | 8:11 a.m.

Never underestimate the time spent staring at the sky and thinking, especially when teaching a teenager how to write.

"We forget that writing is thinking and that we have to teach kids how to think," said Saralyn Lasley, a literacy specialist and a co-chair of the Southern Nevada Writing Project.

Recent data shows a third of Nevada's Millennium Scholarship recipients for the fall of 2002 needed remedial English classes in college because they lacked adequate writing skills.

Simply put: A third of our college kids can't write. And Lasley said the reasons for that are complex.

"First, the teaching of writing is incredibly difficult. It's not like teaching facts. It's process," she said.

Secondly, children don't read as much as they used to, Lasley said. Writers need to read. A lot. And third, teachers now are dealing with many students for whom English isn't a first language.

But the biggest hurdle is that teaching writing means teaching a student to think, rather than to assemble a widget. There isn't a list of facts to memorize or steps to follow.

Youngsters aren't learning how to stop, sit quietly and think about stuff.

"We don't have time. To give kids time to generate ideas and write multiple drafts is contradictory to what we're doing in school because we are constantly assessing them," Lasley said. "But it's only the product we're assessing."

More and more, she said, educators figure "if we can't quantify it, it's not worth teaching."

Lasley's program is a chapter of the National Writing Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

Richard Sterling, executive director of the national project, said students who don't write at college level aren't illiterate. But they "may not be able to write with cohesiveness or with a voice."

"The students don't understand there may be three or four ways they need to know how to write," he said.

The burden of solution falls on many shoulders, according to "The Neglected 'R': The Need for a Writing Revolution," an April report issued by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges.

Politicians and other decision-makers need to double the amount of student time and the amount of money spent on writing. Teachers should incorporate writing instruction in every subject. Parents should see to it that students have the tools they need at home.

And one of those tools is expensive.

Time.

More than computers or pen and paper, writers need time to think, consider, argue, read and think some more.

Maybe growing up with only three television channels (four on the days we could tune in PBS) and plenty of clear sky to contemplate helped.

Having a mother who would have locked us in a shed without food for bringing home unacceptable grades in English certainly didn't hurt. I could flunk geometry (and I did).

"But if you can't read, write and communicate in your own language, you can't do anything," she said.

Kids can't succeed if they can't write. And they can't write if they don't have time to hear themselves think.

For information on the Southern Nevada Writing Project, log onto unlv.edu/programs/snwp.