- As a writing teacher, I had a long career looking over the shoulders of young adults as they wrote. In a university setting, whether they liked it or not, they needed to learn how to write about an academic or professional field. You don't go back to a doctor unless the person in the white coat speaks like a doctor, uses the words, sets them up in combinations that bespeak expertise, and shows through the use of language that the conceptual framework of medicine is operating inside the brain there. No words, no suitable combinations of words, and no application of those words in discussions of examples in the world, and you aren't a doctor. Or a lawyer, or whatever. You have to talk the talk. #
- If you don't talk the talk, there's no reason for anyone to believe that your sight and your insights are governed and illuminated by training.#
- So you'd see 18- or 19-year-olds trying to use the words of the university. (Actually, some would hardly use those words. Some would use the words and sentences of everyday life, and if they couldn't get past that they weren't going to have a college degree later. There aren't any majors where memorizing alone, without being able to talk the talk, will get you a four-year degree.)#
- There'd be a progression in the work of young writers. Some would see that they needed to use the words, but including them in sentences was all they'd be able to manage at first. "I know this word is important so I'm using it."#
- A next step might be to link the word to an example. "We see [keyword] in the story of [example]. Still pretty flat, pretty much a rote performance. "The teacher will punish me if I don't use the word in a sentence next to an example." #
- Eventually, the rote performance becomes boring or a light snaps on--"Wait, this word actually makes something about the example clearer! And more interesting!" And they try to say what that is, maybe roughly at first but with practice, better and better. They start to see the advantage of sounding like a person who's been educated in a field. It's not just the money and the diploma, it's not just to get parents and teachers off your back--a new pattern of language skill starts to change what you can see and think and create. Yes, maybe some old high school friends find your new words pretentious, and maybe in your pride of accomplishment you might be a little off-putting at times, but you start to be a new person because you are a new kind of language-user. You rewire your brain, your eyes, maybe even your heart.#
- With practice, you see more when you use the new words, and you see that simple sentences won't do justice to what those words help you see, and do. Your sentences change, your perceptions change, your skills change.#
- When you use those words in those finer-grain sentences, you risk only speaking or writing for insiders, and that's a real danger and a source of power/control and complacency. But you learn to say things that you would not have been able to think or say before. The words start working in constellations together in your head.#
- Many things make this progression possible. For one thing, the new words and the test cases push and pull at each other, and they don't settle down together without effort. They illustrate and test each other, and they make simple answers and explanations unsatisfying. A finer grain of knowledge evolves in the push and pull of concepts and examples. They refine each other IF you're paying attention to the push and pull of language and world. You refine them if you're paying that kind of attention. You realize eventually that you now know how to pay attention in ways that you couldn't have imagined before.#
- If you're a bit docile or complacent, you let the words show you the world. If you're bolder of mind, you let the test cases show you the limits of the words, and you try to say new things that haven't already been said. You rearrange the constellation taught to you in order to do that. A real professional has a learned constellation and a second one created from personal inquiry. A real pro eventually becomes smarter or sharper than the training predicted.#
- What begins in quoting the words of experts eventually becomes using those words in ways that are your own. Rote performance evolves into judgment and creativity. It's visible in language-oriented fields in the way a person talks and writes. So quoting can be a rote skill and it can be part of an act of high sophistication.#
- A beginner probably can't really see the difference.#
- PS. A student who plagiarizes sometimes can't understand how the professor noticed the theft. Well, this paragraph sounds like it was created as a rote performance of a beginner, and this other paragraph sounds like it depends on the constellation of understanding of a seasoned pro. But sorry, young plagiarizer, you can't actually hear the difference in the words yet, can you? But your professor can in an instant.#
- PPS. I once advised a student to focus on a certain paragraph in her paper as she revised, the best one, and maybe even to use it as the first paragraph of the next draft, and maybe even to throw away all the other paragraphs. Just build on that one lively paragraph where the ideas were really starting to click. Emotion was in her voice as she said, roughly, "But my roommate wrote that one paragraph and I wrote all the others!"#
- People were talking about big government, and about regulations being job killers. The conversation seemed naive, and I spent some time and wrote this:#
- My brother died at work twenty-seven years ago, when he was in his early thirties, leaving a wife and small children. He was working on an electric line on a utility pole in a suburban neighborhood and he was electrocuted.#
- Some months later a person from OSHA came to my parents with the accident report. Speaking of workplace safety, he told my father, "Every one of the regulations is written in someone's blood."#
- About a year later, another lineman from the same Midwestern electric company was electrocuted at work. On the evening news, a reporter asked the company's representative if these kinds of accidents happened frequently and how long it had been since the last one. The company man said that they were very rare and that he couldn't remember when the last one took place. The reporter didn't know enough to push back against that phony, self-serving answer. Episodes like this show me how much we need strong regulatory agencies, skillful watchdog journalists, and activist citizens groups, and why we always will.#
- As a writing teacher, I had a long career looking over the shoulders of young adults as they wrote. In a university setting, whether they liked it or not, they needed to learn how to write about an academic or professional field. You don't go back to a doctor unless the person in the white coat speaks like a doctor, uses the words, sets them up in combinations that bespeak expertise, and shows through the use of language that the conceptual framework of medicine is operating inside the brain there. No words, no suitable combinations of words, and no application of those words in discussions of examples in the world, and you aren't a doctor. Or a lawyer, or whatever. You have to talk the talk. #
- If you don't talk the talk, there's no reason for anyone to believe that your sight and your insights are governed and illuminated by training.#
- So you'd see 18- or 19-year-olds trying to use the words of the university. (Actually, some would hardly use those words. Some would use the words and sentences of everyday life, and if they couldn't get past that they weren't going to have a college degree later. There aren't any majors where memorizing alone, without being able to talk the talk, will get you a four-year degree.)#
- There'd be a progression in the work of young writers. Some would see that they needed to use the words, but including them in sentences was all they'd be able to manage at first. "I know this word is important so I'm using it."#
- A next step might be to link the word to an example. "We see [keyword] in the story of [example]. Still pretty flat, pretty much a rote performance. "The teacher will punish me if I don't use the word in a sentence next to an example." #
- Eventually, the rote performance becomes boring or a light snaps on--"Wait, this word actually makes something about the example clearer! And more interesting!" And they try to say what that is, maybe roughly at first but with practice, better and better. They start to see the advantage of sounding like a person who's been educated in a field. It's not just the money and the diploma, it's not just to get parents and teachers off your back--a new pattern of language skill starts to change what you can see and think and create. Yes, maybe some old high school friends find your new words pretentious, and maybe in your pride of accomplishment you might be a little off-putting at times, but you start to be a new person because you are a new kind of language-user. You rewire your brain, your eyes, maybe even your heart.#
- With practice, you see more when you use the new words, and you see that simple sentences won't do justice to what those words help you see, and do. Your sentences change, your perceptions change, your skills change.#
- When you use those words in those finer-grain sentences, you risk only speaking or writing for insiders, and that's a real danger and a source of power/control and complacency. But you learn to say things that you would not have been able to think or say before. The words start working in constellations together in your head.#
- Many things make this progression possible. For one thing, the new words and the test cases push and pull at each other, and they don't settle down together without effort. They illustrate and test each other, and they make simple answers and explanations unsatisfying. A finer grain of knowledge evolves in the push and pull of concepts and examples. They refine each other IF you're paying attention to the push and pull of language and world. You refine them if you're paying that kind of attention. You realize eventually that you now know how to pay attention in ways that you couldn't have imagined before.#
- If you're a bit docile or complacent, you let the words show you the world. If you're bolder of mind, you let the test cases show you the limits of the words, and you try to say new things that haven't already been said. You rearrange the constellation taught to you in order to do that. A real professional has a learned constellation and a second one created from personal inquiry. A real pro eventually becomes smarter or sharper than the training predicted.#
- What begins in quoting the words of experts eventually becomes using those words in ways that are your own. Rote performance evolves into judgment and creativity. It's visible in language-oriented fields in the way a person talks and writes. So quoting can be a rote skill and it can be part of an act of high sophistication.#
- A beginner probably can't really see the difference.#
- PS. A student who plagiarizes sometimes can't understand how the professor noticed the theft. Well, this paragraph sounds like it was created as a rote performance of a beginner, and this other paragraph sounds like it depends on the constellation of understanding of a seasoned pro. But sorry, young plagiarizer, you can't actually hear the difference in the words yet, can you? But your professor can in an instant.#
- PPS. I once advised a student to focus on a certain paragraph in her paper as she revised, the best one, and maybe even to use it as the first paragraph of the next draft, and maybe even to throw away all the other paragraphs. Just build on that one lively paragraph where the ideas were really starting to click. Emotion was in her voice as she said, roughly, "But my roommate wrote that one paragraph and I wrote all the others!"#
- People were talking about big government, and about regulations being job killers. The conversation seemed naive, and I spent some time and wrote this:#
- My brother died at work twenty-seven years ago, when he was in his early thirties, leaving a wife and small children. He was working on an electric line on a utility pole in a suburban neighborhood and he was electrocuted.#
- Some months later a person from OSHA came to my parents with the accident report. Speaking of workplace safety, he told my father, "Every one of the regulations is written in someone's blood."#
- About a year later, another lineman from the same Midwestern electric company was electrocuted at work. On the evening news, a reporter asked the company's representative if these kinds of accidents happened frequently and how long it had been since the last one. The company man said that they were very rare and that he couldn't remember when the last one took place. The reporter didn't know enough to push back against that phony, self-serving answer. Episodes like this show me how much we need strong regulatory agencies, skillful watchdog journalists, and activist citizens groups, and why we always will.#