4. Writing to Learn

• William returned to the campus of Gustavus Adolphus University in Minnesota to see how their experiment in writing across the curriculum went. Professors who chose to participate listed their course with a W next to it, implying that it included a significant amount of writing. All agreed that far more learning had occurred with the addition of a writing requirement. One professor even had students write a short paper during the last five minutes of class, summarizing his lecture.
• Reading, writing, and thinking are all integrated. Science professors graded lab reports for clarity of writing. (Doug: I did this when I taught high school chemistry from 1971 to 1982.) Grading can be painful as you are operating on a student’s work. Failure is a great teacher. It’s often the beginning of wisdom. If you want students to write for their peers, assign them to write a paper that will be read aloud in class. Recent graduates told William that what they really needed in college were writing courses, as they had to write a lot on the job.

5. Crotchets and Convictions

• Type A writing transmits existing ideas or information. This is what most people need to get through the day. Type B writing is expository. It enables us to discover what we want to say. It is a voyage of discovery. They are both useful. Information is an active agent, something that does not just sit there passively but “informs.” The enemy of clear writing is noise, which comes in several varieties. They include ambiguity, redundancy, misuse, vagueness, jargon, pomposity, and clutter. Obscurity is a deadly sin. Work hard to avoid it.
• Short is usually better. Short words and sentences are easier for the eye and mind to process. Jargon is what people in specialized fields use to communicate. Try to only use it if you need to or risk sounding pompous. Avoid nouns that are concepts like capacity, tendency, and conclusion. Use active verbs rather than passive ones. For example, I saw the boys skating, not The boys were seen skating. Write like you enjoy what you are doing, and it will come through. There are some very cool examples of good and bad writing here that you will enjoy and learn from.

Part II: 6. Earth, Sea, and Sky

• Your job as a science teacher or principal should be to expose students to writing that is both excellent as science and as prose. This chapter contains a number of fine examples that you can use with high school and some middle school students.

7. Art and Artists

• Art is a language that has to be studied like any other language. We don’t usually think that looking at art is reading, but it is indeed its own type of reading and has to be learned. Artists and art historians, therefore, see and know a lot more than we do. Visual communications is like other kinds of communications. A painting like The Scream by Munch, for example, can give one a sudden, vast, and quite irresistible sensation of panic and dismay.
• Scientists need art to clarify the world’s complexity, while artists need scientists to form principles for analyzing appearances. Good art writing should help us to see, and there are many good examples here. The eye and the brain are part of one system that constantly makes the world more consistent than it really is. Typefaces are the tone of voice of written work. Think of them as the clothes that words wear.

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