I came across a draft of a poem that I don't remember writing, but it's in a form I use and it's about the child our next door neighbors adopted in maybe 1970.#
Her parents and her siblings were killed in a car crash. She survived with broken bones and scars. She was young enough that the older folks hoped that eventually she might not remember the worst of this. Her aunt and uncle adopted her, and after the hospital she came to live with them and her young cousins of similar age, next door to us.#
She had a cast on a broken arm, I recall, and some stitches or plastic surgery healing on her face, maybe also arm or leg, I'm not sure.#
She was very quiet at first, as you'd guess. Traumatized, slow to emerge as a playful child again. In my memory, the healing of her scars proceeded at the same slow pace as the full return of her smile. #
I can't tell you the last time I remembered her. She'd be in her fifties now. Reading the old poem, I hoped she had healed and healed. #
I keep trying to put my finger on what our schools used to teach about outlining, maybe still do, and how it differs from the experience of writing in an outliner.#
Schools asked young writers to outline before they wrote; outliner software invites people to outline as they write. #
Schools asked people to outline before they wrote. To organize skeletal materials, usually in a fairly general way, before composing paragraphs: a more extended, though not necessarily more nuanced version of the content.#
School outlines were meant to apply a facade of control over the enthusiastic chaos of some young minds. #
Unfortunately, once a general plan is in place, the most important part of organizing begins: setting out the relationship between adjoining sentences and across strings of sentences. (Which is where and how sophistication of thought has a chance to reveal itself.) That means that in composing the extended and hopefully more nuanced version, the work of organizing continues, on the ground, relationship by relationship, phrase by phrase, precision by precision, nuance by nuance. #
Schools didn't tend to be able to hand over much insight about that part of the process, I judge, and that's why lots of people entered college not ready to write an extended discussion made up of carefully linked ideas. They were often ready to write papers that resembled bullet lists, which is essentially what an unsophisticated outline is.#
We've all read a piece of writing organized about the same way as a grocery list. The organization of a grocery list is either absent, or simple--following the general plan of the store. Handy, maybe, but not deep.#
Outliner software invites a person to keep alive all through the composing process both the broad plan (the bullet list, say) and the sentence-by-sentence linking-and-thinking, where thought has a chance to deepen.#
Understood this way, what schools used to teach about outlining is misleading and mischievous nonsense. But that nonsense may still be afloat in the dusty back shelves of many brains of my vintage, leading folks to be puzzled about why they'd want to look into writing with a tool for thought like Drummer.#
A classmate from the old days posted this potent quotation from a new book by Jelani Cobb and David Remnick.#
“We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster.”#
When they got to the idea that we Americans don't dare look at our own lives very closely, I thought for a moment that Cobb and Remnick had been reading James Baldwin, who talked about that notion roughly sixty years ago. #
But when I checked out their book I saw that Cobb and Remnick weren't influenced by Baldwin, and they weren't quoting him, not in the usual sense. Their book, The Matter of Black Lives, is an anthology of pieces The New Yorker magazine published over the years about race. The passage is from near the end of his longer essay, which they reprinted in full, that went on to form the bulk of his great little book The Fire Next Time.#
Baldwin's diagnosis seems as true today as it was in 1962. It's hard to get our leaders to say true and meaningful things, and it's hard for the rest of us as citizens to be strong and bold enough to get those leaders to pay attention, to get serious, to turn this massive ship toward a proper port. Seems unlikely the leaders will stay focused unless we force the issue somehow. Because most of us are not skillful as active citizens, it's probably not going to happen. So much for saving our dignity, or the country, or the planet.#
PS. Regan says about her father, King Lear: “He hath ever but slenderly known himself,” and you may remember how that turns out. #
I came across a draft of a poem that I don't remember writing, but it's in a form I use and it's about the child our next door neighbors adopted in maybe 1970.#
Her parents and her siblings were killed in a car crash. She survived with broken bones and scars. She was young enough that the older folks hoped that eventually she might not remember the worst of this. Her aunt and uncle adopted her, and after the hospital she came to live with them and her young cousins of similar age, next door to us.#
She had a cast on a broken arm, I recall, and some stitches or plastic surgery healing on her face, maybe also arm or leg, I'm not sure.#
She was very quiet at first, as you'd guess. Traumatized, slow to emerge as a playful child again. In my memory, the healing of her scars proceeded at the same slow pace as the full return of her smile. #
I can't tell you the last time I remembered her. She'd be in her fifties now. Reading the old poem, I hoped she had healed and healed. #
I keep trying to put my finger on what our schools used to teach about outlining, maybe still do, and how it differs from the experience of writing in an outliner.#
Schools asked young writers to outline before they wrote; outliner software invites people to outline as they write. #
Schools asked people to outline before they wrote. To organize skeletal materials, usually in a fairly general way, before composing paragraphs: a more extended, though not necessarily more nuanced version of the content.#
School outlines were meant to apply a facade of control over the enthusiastic chaos of some young minds. #
Unfortunately, once a general plan is in place, the most important part of organizing begins: setting out the relationship between adjoining sentences and across strings of sentences. (Which is where and how sophistication of thought has a chance to reveal itself.) That means that in composing the extended and hopefully more nuanced version, the work of organizing continues, on the ground, relationship by relationship, phrase by phrase, precision by precision, nuance by nuance. #
Schools didn't tend to be able to hand over much insight about that part of the process, I judge, and that's why lots of people entered college not ready to write an extended discussion made up of carefully linked ideas. They were often ready to write papers that resembled bullet lists, which is essentially what an unsophisticated outline is.#
We've all read a piece of writing organized about the same way as a grocery list. The organization of a grocery list is either absent, or simple--following the general plan of the store. Handy, maybe, but not deep.#
Outliner software invites a person to keep alive all through the composing process both the broad plan (the bullet list, say) and the sentence-by-sentence linking-and-thinking, where thought has a chance to deepen.#
Understood this way, what schools used to teach about outlining is misleading and mischievous nonsense. But that nonsense may still be afloat in the dusty back shelves of many brains of my vintage, leading folks to be puzzled about why they'd want to look into writing with a tool for thought like Drummer.#
A classmate from the old days posted this potent quotation from a new book by Jelani Cobb and David Remnick.#
“We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster.”#
When they got to the idea that we Americans don't dare look at our own lives very closely, I thought for a moment that Cobb and Remnick had been reading James Baldwin, who talked about that notion roughly sixty years ago. #
But when I checked out their book I saw that Cobb and Remnick weren't influenced by Baldwin, and they weren't quoting him, not in the usual sense. Their book, The Matter of Black Lives, is an anthology of pieces The New Yorker magazine published over the years about race. The passage is from near the end of his longer essay, which they reprinted in full, that went on to form the bulk of his great little book The Fire Next Time.#
Baldwin's diagnosis seems as true today as it was in 1962. It's hard to get our leaders to say true and meaningful things, and it's hard for the rest of us as citizens to be strong and bold enough to get those leaders to pay attention, to get serious, to turn this massive ship toward a proper port. Seems unlikely the leaders will stay focused unless we force the issue somehow. Because most of us are not skillful as active citizens, it's probably not going to happen. So much for saving our dignity, or the country, or the planet.#
PS. Regan says about her father, King Lear: “He hath ever but slenderly known himself,” and you may remember how that turns out. #
Copyright ⓒ 2021 by Ken Smith
Last update: Wednesday October 13, 2021; 3:04 PM EDT.