an antidote

I'm pleased to add the Young Writers Project to my blogroll. A dynamic local initiative for school-age writers. And the perfect antidote to this pessimistic post from last May:

The empty calories of middle school prose
Tuesday, May 23

My stepdaughter is being taught in eighth-grade English that a paragraph must consist of at least four sentences. Not three, not two, not one. This absurd quota means students will be tempted – as my stepdaughter has – to fill their paragraphs with extra sentences regardless of meaning and relevance. She’s also being taught to conclude her essays by re-stating the “thematic statement” using synonyms. I suspect such rules are created so that prose – something that lacks universal form – can be broken down and the parts assigned calculable value for ease of grading. But along the way, Generation Next is learning to be a repetitive, fatty, appearance-driven communicator. Another overweight American in a belly shirt. This ill-conceived approach to nascent writing mars clarity of thought and stymies creativity. It’s not Instant Messenger we need worry about. In fact, that method of communication is more than a little wondrous – the code, the brevity, the efficiency. It is creative, in flux, without rules. I turn to Charles Bukowski who once wrote, “as the spirit wanes the form appears,” a seven-word sentence that can sum up a human life. Bukowski means that when a writer or artist, or any human being for that matter, loses touch with their inspiration, they cloak that deficiency with structure, with form. In the case of the instruction my step-daughter and her classmates receive, “as the form appears the spirit is retarded.” These are 13- and 14-year old kids. The future.

Also, check out this feature on YWP and student blogging, originally published in The Burlington Free Press.