William Zinsser: Writing to Learn, 1988.

## 1 

"Learning, ..., takes a multitude of forms; expect to find them in places where you least expect them to be."

"writing is a basic skill for getting through life."

"Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly - about any subject at all."

## 2 Writing across the curriculum

"A science-minded student, if he were encouraged to write about a scientific or technological subject, would soon find that he could do it. He would discover that writing is primarily an exercise in logic and that words are just tools designed to do a specific job."

"Writing is learned by imitation."

"the essence of writing is rewriting."

the shift from "product" to "process": "It puts emphasis where it should have been all along: on the successive rewritings and rethinkings that mold an act of writing into the best possible form. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself."

"to the English department: 'Why can't you teach these students to write?' The English teachers said, 'They write well for us, but in your classes they don't have that expectation - students don't think of writing as being any part of you courses."

"...everything is voluntary. If the program had been imposed by the administration I don't think it would work.""

"Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow. Writing was such an avenue - perhaps, in fact, the main route."

## 3 A Liberal Education

"One of the underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose a narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material." 

"writing is linear and sequential." "the reader should be given only as much information as he needs and not one word more. Anything else is a self-indulgence."

"I don't like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written - in having finally made an arrangement that has a certain inevitability, like the solution to a mathematical problem. Perhaps in no other line of work is delayed gratification is so delayed."

## 4 Writing to learn

professor of Psychology: "One thing I did last term was to ask the students to write a paper in the last five minutes of class, summarizing what I had said in the lecture. It helps them to find out whether they understood what I was talking about."

"Fuzzy thinking turned up repeatedly as the main enemy."

"An idea can have a value in itself, but its usefulness diminishes to the extent that you can't articulate it to someone else."

assignment:
"...students to bring in a historical passage that they considered well written and to explain why."

"Writing could get into corners that other teaching tools couldn't reach."

For example,
"There's a feedback that isn't possible when the teacher just grades from numerical answers."

"...the act of writing gives the teacher a window into the brain of his student." - no inside look on the basis of right/wrong answers: "tests that measure the student's learning by what he knows, not by how he got to know it: multiple-choice exams and short-answer questions." In real-world professions reasoning also needs to be given.

"Unfortunately, there is no quick and easy way to teach writing." Teaching writing is likened to the work of social/day care workers, nurses. Time and patience needed.

"... educating future scientists to be more attuned to the impact of their work, and educating the rest of us to be more scientifically literate. ... As citizens we are responsible for what we know and what we don't know."

"Writing is a tool that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with facts and ideas. It's a physical activity, unlike reading. Writing requires us to operate some kind of mechanism - pencil, pen, typewriter, word processor - for getting our thoughts on paper. It compels us by the repeated effort of language to go after those thoughts and organize them and present them clearly. It forces us to keep asking, 'Am I saying what I want to say?' Very often the answer is 'No'. It's a useful piece of information."

Students assigned to read their papers aloud in the class. They write for their peers, not for the teacher. The feedback is the presence or absence of the response. Bad paper, nothing to discuss, nowhere to start a conversation. 

## 5 Crotchets and convictions

Two kinds of writing:
  - explanatory: writing transmits existing information or ideas.
  - exploratory: writing that enables us to discover what we want to say.

Questions to ask in explanatory writing: "What do I want to say?", "Have I said it?", "What do I need to say next? Will it lead logically out of what I've just written? Will it also lead logically toward where I want to go?", "Did it do the job I wanted it to do, with no ambiguity?", "What does the reader need to know?", "How can I explain it the way that would be the easiest to grasp?"

"simple style is the result of harder thinking and harder work"

"how we write is how we define ourselves - our style is who we are"

"In writing, short is usually better than long. Short words and sentences are easier for the eye and the mind to process than long ones, and an article that makes its case succinctly is the highest form of courtesy to the reader."

"Brevity is the sign of a well-organized mind."

"jargon consists of special terms that every occupation has found it necessary to invent ... trouble arises ... when users become so dependent on their private terminology that they claim they can't express themselves in any other way."

"Nouns that denote concepts are the death of vigorous writing. Good writing is specific and concrete."

# PART II (examples)

## 8 The Natural World

"Nonfiction writing should always have a point: It should leave the reader with a set of facts, or an idea, or a point of view, that he didn't have before he started reading."

"What had formed the straightforward style was the discipline of cranking out textbooks that popularized science by presenting it to students in prose that was both simple and interesting."

"A good writer always knows what his readers are thinking and what they want to be told next."

## 9 Writing Mathematics

Joan Countryman: "I've been asking my students to write about mathematics as they learned it, with predictably wonderful results. Writing seems to free them of the idea that math is a collection of right answers owned by the teacher - a body of knowledge that she will dispense in chunks and that they have to swallow and digest. ... But what makes mathematics really interesting is not the right answer but where it came from and where it leads."

mathematical autobiographies -> math topics to explore in writing

"...the math teacher not only has the custody of all the right answers; the teacher (or his surrogate, the textbook) also provides all the questions."

## 11 Writing Physics and Chemistry

"Reduce your discipline - whatever it is - to a logical sequence of clearly thought sentences."

" 'Once students accept the fact that correct but poorly written answers are unacceptable, most of them write more carefully.' " 

"... opportunity to correct errors in a nonpunitive manner."

" 'employers complain that science graduates are technically competent but can't communicate. They are able to make reams of calculation but they can't explain the purpose for, or the significance of, those calculations.' "

" 'I believe that writing is an effective means of thinking skills because a person must mentally process ideas in order to write an explanation. Writing also improves self-esteem because mentally processed ideas then belong to the writer and not just to the teacher or the textbook author. ' "

Writing is a craft like plumbing, with its own set of tools. "Learn to use the tools without fear. They are not some kind of secret apparatus owned by the English teacher or any other teacher. They are simple mechanisms for putting your thoughts on paper. Enjoy finding out how they work. Take as much pleasure in what an active verb can do for you as in what a mathematical formula will do, or a computer, or a centrifuge."