The Logic of Reading and Writing

[1,850 words]

Let’s examine reading and writing as two sides of the same process, what can be called encoding [translating your thoughts into a code which you place on a page] and decoding [deciphering that code and hearing the language of the original thought]. It is a truly remarkable human achievement, for it allows communication across space and time. Research tells us that the map of the language, what we know as grammar, is embedded very early in the life of the average human, as early as 18 months of age. Most of the map is complete by age 3. Students arrive for their first school experience already very conversant in the language. Since the brain has evolved to embed the grammar of language at a very early age, it will do so for any language a child is exposed to during this crucial developmental moment. That is why young children raised in a foreign country are often bi-lingual and parents look to their children to translate for them. As adults, the moment for embedding grammar is long past. The role of the teacher in this process, then, is more labeling grammar than teaching it. If students do not already understand the grammar of the language they cannot follow the teacher’s directions. No verbal communication is possible.

The import of this brief overview is that language is rule-governed behavior and to the extent that we share the same rules and understand words in the same way we can communicate efficiently. The rules, which govern the syntax, or order of the words, in sentences that make sense, are a reflection of the highly logical structure of language. Thought, utilizing language, is therefore logical, a function of the structure of the language, and generative, in the sense that while each thought, or sentence, is logical in isolation, it also generates the next thought in a logical chain. I am arguing that people cannot help but think logically, for they are bound by the very structure of language, its grammar, to do so. It also follows that their thoughts represent a chain of logic. Often, in school curriculum, we do not pay enough attention to these two facts: first, that students arrive with a grammar intact and second, they are already programmed by the language to think and express themselves logically. What schools need to teach is decoding, which allows them to read the thoughts others have encoded and then to encode their own thoughts. Reading precedes writing, for the most part, but both follow on the heels of language and grammar, acquired well before school.

While writing the preceding two paragraphs, I did no preparation other than to start with the idea that the very structure of the language imposes logic on thought. I did not brainstorm, although I did some musing. I made no outline and am not really sure what I will write next. I used no graphic organizer to predict or discover my thoughts. No spider diagrams. I did not use any visual tool and most of what I have written I did not know I knew; I discovered it in the act of writing. And I suspect there are a number of students, perhaps a significant plurality, who are just like me, a prisoner of the logic of the language and a discoverer of their own thoughts during the act of writing.

As I have stated, writing is often characterized as a process for recording thought. According to this model, all the hard thinking is done beforehand and various visual supports are used to facilitate this process. The act of writing records prepared thought. so the theory goes. This model covers many types of writing tasks. However, in an academic context, writing is much more a generative process. Rather than simply recording thought, it creates thought and, since logic is embedded within the grammar of the language, the chain of sentences cannot help but be logical. I have been thinking about this issue for some time, but there is only so deep I could go by thinking alone. It took the act of writing to uncover the complexity of this idea. Do we ever teach writing as a tool of thinking? Even though we may pay lip service to it, do we ever encourage this process? I would argue, from my own observation, that, at nearly every step of the way, our teaching practices impede this process and substitute pre-writing activities that frustrate the natural role of writing as a tool.

However it evolved, writing, in most of Western Culture, has developed a set of conventions. As in the page you are reading now, the words are laid down from left to right and wrap around with each line. When the writer/reader reaches the bottom of one page, or column, he proceeds to the top of the next page or column and starts over. Although this may seem obvious, it has profound implications for learning to read and write. The linear aspect of the representation supports the logical, generative nature of the language.

I contend that most of the pedagogy for reading and writing does not take into account the logic of language. Current pedagogy is based on the exceptionalities of the language, rather than its commonalities. In common practice, people communicate efficiently and effectively for the greater part of their lives. Most people share common maps and word understandings. The occasional miscommunication, however, can have extraordinary consequences and thus is given great weight in our classrooms. But I contend that teaching based on a negative model of communication has led more often to failure than success.

Let me offer a few examples:

There are a small number of students with moderate to severe handicaps in reading and writing. A great deal of research has been conducted to address their needs. Graphical displays have proved to be beneficial with many of these problem readers. So have some summarizing and predicting strategies. The success of this research has worked its way through the general curriculum as strategies that will be effective for all. Thus, these scaffolds have become default strategies in most classes, rather than scaffolds designed for targeted use with only those students who need them and only for as long as they need them. The same, or very similar, graphic organizers are used for pre-writing activities from 4^th-12^th grade, at all levels including college prep. and honors classes. The communication gap for problematic readers, affecting only a small percentage of all learners, has become the model for teaching everyone.
Creative writers have the license to stretch and sometimes break the logical structure of the language. This they do to the delight of all. In its most extreme form, James Joyce or William Faulkner in fiction, William Carlos Williams or Emily Dickinson in poetry, or Eugene Ionesco or Samuel Beckett in drama, this technique represents a virtual assault upon the language. Their work properly becomes the focus of literary analysis in language arts classes. But it is a huge mistake to assume that the communication problems rather elegantly contrived by these writers prove the difficulty of human communication. The entire canon of the world’s literature still only represents less than a tenth of 1 percent of human communication. It is a mistake to base our models for such communication on such deliberately problematic examples. Most of daily life is, exactly that, mundane. The study of the language should begin there. I do not begin and end with every day speech. Most written communication, at the highest expository levels, newspaper articles, magazines, non-fiction books, content area texts, corporate and governmental memoranda, are irony-free zones. Writers normally go to extraordinary lengths to communicate clearly, as do every day writers of letters and e-mail. Logic is the stitching that holds all this fabric together. And logic is inherent in the very structure of language.
Desktop publishing has flourished at the same moment as learning theory has run completely amuck. These are two mirrors which reflect each other. Gaze at any cable news channel or web page and then open any school textbook and you will see a commonality of view. The texts are awash in color and filled with distracting icons, pictures and other graphical content. The text has background colors and is often discontinuous. This is eye-candy at best; at worst, it reinforces the view that text is only one component of communication. Current theory espouses the view that thinking is somewhat random and definitely spatial. The mind wants to be wrenched from the linear prison of prose and transported to some transcendental tier of thought. The heart of this concept is the brainstorm, an apt metaphor for what supposedly the brain does well. The brain wants to fire neurons in all directions. After a period of rapid-fire free-association, these seemingly random thoughts can be harnessed by graphic organizers and turned against their will into a finished, logical and coherent essay. This is so hard for students because it is so counter-intuitive. They know on some level that their thoughts are already logical and to begin to write them down generates logical sequences. Yet they are asked daily to suspend the normal processes of language in service of this mad pedagogy. One could argue that the high price of colorful text has produced 700 years of dreary black ink on white paper, with hundreds of words jammed onto leaves in the interest of economy. Now that desktop publishing has made colorful, graphical pages so very inexpensive, why not liberate the mind, why not make the page match the writer’s creativity? To do so, I must argue, is to challenge the very structure of language. And the way we have arranged text traditionally has as much to do with the way language works as it does with economics.

How did students from the past learn to write? How could the reading public during the founding of our republic have picked up the daily newspaper and read the Federalist Papers by Publius (Hamilton, Jay and Madison)? Have you ever tried to read a Federalist Paper? Who taught the union soldiers to write such beautiful letters home during the Civil War? How could they have done so in the absence of what we think we know today about learning to write?

Prior to the current revolution in writing theory, most of us learned to write by mimesis, that is by imitation. We studied models and tried our best to produce them. In the world of art it is called ‘tracing the masters.’ That is how Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write, by reading issues of Addison and Steele’s The Spectator, and then trying to reproduce the brilliance of their thoughts in the patterns of their prose.

I would love to see a research study of two groups: one would be a control group, utilizing the latest methods; the second would be an experimental group, where students would be encouraged to write and write and write, and then handed solid and multiple models of what good writing looks like. After a few weeks, give both groups the same assessment. I would double-down on group two.