Four centuries ago Francis Bacon observed, “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.” This perhaps encapsulates what we do here at IEW® more than any other aphorism. Our tag line says it as well: “Listen. Speak. Read. Write. Think!”
Indeed, we continuously encourage reading and especially reading aloud to children of all ages, thereby helping furnish their minds with a rich vocabulary, a range of grammatical constructions, and a repertoire of expression that will empower their speaking and writing forevermore.
Encouraging speaking, from the informal narration of stories in our PAL Writing program, to the formal retelling of content from key word outlines, to the prepared and polished presentations of Speech Boot Camp [discontinued—See Introduction to Public Speaking.] and the NCFCA Guides to Speech and Debate [discontinued], we realize that verbal communication skills are an essential—but sometimes overlooked—component of an excellent language arts education.
And of course, our Structure and Style® writing program has proven to prepare students well—often far beyond their peers—for the writing tasks that await them in higher education or professional work. Now in the thousands, the testimonials we have received are too numerous to catalog or display. But there are two additional benefits gained by persevering with the IEW program: better learning and better thinking, which go hand in hand.
Years ago, a grade five teacher who had been using the Structure and Style syllabus faithfully in a small Christian school reported to me that at the end of the year, one of her students came to her and with great sincerity explained, “Mrs. Eide, I have learned more in your class this year than any other class. I feel like I’ve learned how to think better!” While any teacher would surely relish such a compliment, this teacher realized that in great part it had to do with the effect of the writing program she had used so diligently.
But why is our approach so significantly better than others? In part it is because rather than starting with, “Think of something to write so you can learn how to do it,” we allow students to begin by retelling and rewriting existing ideas. This parallels the ancient rhetoric exercises of which the first was to retell a fable. It is another way of doing “text reconstruction,” a method used by Benjamin Franklin, W. Somerset Maugham, and others to train themselves by imitation and thereby improve their composition skills. Additionally, though, we see that as students move through the nine units of the syllabus, they gradually learn better how to create content by asking increasingly difficult questions. As students learn to ask better questions, they are actually learning to think better.
But even beyond this we can observe in our students (as well as in our own lives) that when we write, the exactitude required builds a greater understanding of the ideas we are presenting. Through reading and experience we acquire knowledge and information, through speaking, that knowledge becomes more real and concrete, but through writing, it becomes clear and precise. I’m certain we’ve all had the experience of having some ideas floating about in our mind, and then the act of writing forces us to lasso them, hold them, affix the words carefully, and commit them to the page, thereby gaining a much greater apprehension of what was once a bit fuzzy. Writing clarifies thinking.
In Writing to Learn, the author, William Zinsser, master journalist, editor, and educator, relates in great detail and with many examples how students universally report having learned more deeply the things they wrote about than those they didn’t. He continues throughout the book to show how writing about art, geography, the natural world, humanity, and even mathematics, chemistry, and physics is so valuable to the process of learning and understanding those subjects.
We at IEW have long known this, which is why we began seventeen years ago to add to our core video training products the theme-based writing lessons [now called Writing Across the Curriculum] books. Starting with the Bible, expanding to history, and even into literature and science, our theme-based books’ authors have brought their love of a subject to the teaching of writing, thus smoothly merging the study of a subject and the writing about it. What a blessing these have been to teachers and home educating parents who not only want their children to write well but to grow in knowledge as they do.
The “Learning Pyramid” has been reiterated in various forms for decades (and sometimes refuted), but it essentially illustrates that by merely reading or listening to information, retention is quite low, perhaps 5–10 percent. An audiovisual presentation or demonstration increases retention to 20–30 percent, while a discussion improves retention rates to around 50 percent. However, the most efficient way to learn any information is to write or teach it, bringing retention to 75–90 percent. These estimates are, of course, very approximate and may vary with individual differences in neurology and aptitude. However, they do support what most of us instinctively know to be true.
Therefore, as we continue this great adventure of educating our children, let us remember that while we help them learn to write well, they will also be writing to learn better and think better, gaining clarity and understanding of our wonderful world and its infinite intricacies.
