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For some reason cartons of my old undergraduate handouts, notes and essays, with a lot of other prehistoric paper, have been jamming up our cupboards for years, and I’ve been thinking of putting a lot of it through the shredder. Heather said she’d like to compost it for the garden and could we start ASAP please. I thought I’d take a look through it first, which got me thinking seriously about University for the first time in 50 years, and meant that turning it into compost was going to take quite a while.
The old handouts and reading lists I’ve kept clearly pre-date the advent of photocopiers, let alone the ability to gussy things up with graphics and fonts. But that just makes them look a bit primitive now. Much more significant is the fact that everything I wrote myself was by hand, sometimes with a fountain pen, sometimes with a ballpoint.
I reckon ballpoint pens were the death of good cursive writing. And the Apple Pen is worse. Even less friction means even less care paid to the formation of letters. Although that’s academic now, at least for me. After almost 40 years on keyboards I’ve lost my handwriting ability almost entirely. I find it hard to even sign my name since I need to do it so infrequently.
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Looking through my old notes made me wonder how important the act of writing them was to the act of remembering.
I was pretty good at exams. I used to revise for them by rereading, editing, and amplifying my notes — to stay focused, and to make them more complete, more comprehensible and more readable.
Maybe you can absorb as much by reading or watching lectures online without the engagement of note writing and review, but I don’t believe it.
And that got me thinking about how — apparently — we now teach children to read and write as if those skills are the same as oral expression, which we learn literally at the feet of our parents, siblings and others. Surely they’re not.
I don’t think my parents taught me to read although they certainly read to me. I have vivid memories of learning the alphabet at school — practising the shapes of letters and the sounds they represent, and reading and writing the simple words in our first primer books. I remember chanting our times tables just as clearly.
It was only after we’d learnt the basics of word attack that I could take off and fly solo. I took those tools home and read everything from the Women’s Weekly to Agatha Christie to Dad’s books about the War and Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia. I was and am an autodidact so it wasn’t perfect. Today I can’t pronounce many words that I comfortably use and understand — because I’ve never heard them said out loud. For a while I thought that my mother’s cookbook title was pronounced re-sypes.
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Reading taught me how to write — more or less.
Reading and writing helped me absorb English grammar — more or less.
Even back in the 1950s and ‘60s little attention was paid to grammar, so even though I’m very conscious that there are rules — and do my best to apply them — I can’t talk about them with precision because I lack the words to do so. I “know” them by mimicry, but I don’t know them — the same way I can use a keyboard even though I don’t know the layout. The same way we learned to listen and speak — but only once we had the basics.
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Where is this train of thought heading?
I read voraciously as a kid because it opened up to me a world of stories, adventure and romance — people, ideas and exploration. Here I was, little me on our dairy farm in Hikurangi, New Zealand, Planet Earth, The Universe. Like Luke Skywalker on his Aunt and Uncle’s Moisture Farm in the deserts of Tatooine. I still remember how dusty and battered Luke’s Speeder looked back in the ‘70s — as used and real as my Dad’s tractor was back in the ‘50s.
Clearly no kid needs to read now to fill up on those experiences, and that’s understandable. My daughter bought me a Larousse book for Christmas three years ago. It’s about baking bread, and beautiful, but in many ways not as helpful as YouTube Show and Tell — So that’s how you knead. That’s how you know a loaf is ready for the oven. That’s how to make focaccia — how to poke and jiggle the wet dough and massage it with first-press olive oil.
There’s less need to read.
The unintended consequence of all this has been a generation well educated, but in many cases much more discriminating about fonts, graphics, video and layout than they are about the clarity and style of text on the page. Less able to present a good argument than to make a bad one look nice. Less able to produce good writing than to read it — because they haven’t done much reading. Less aware, too, of the rules of English grammar that I absorbed through unconscious mimicry — through reading whenever and whatever I could. The young would hate my old History and Political Studies handouts.
So I reckon the Women’s Weekly, Agatha Christie and Dad’s books about the War paid a dividend. Reading everything I could get my hands on helped me write and express myself with some facility. That’s good because my lack of mathematical skills, for example, would have closed many other professional doors. I learned trigonometry, algebra and calculus at school but I’m not sure I could solve even a quadratic equation now. I do know what an isosceles triangle is, and I can do long division. All I remember of calculus is a symbol: ∫. Thank God for those times tables.
Back to my point, learning to read and write well is to some extent now voluntary — like going to the gym to get fit instead of “putting your back into it” at work.
If we don’t put in the hours at the gym we pay a price for our sedentary lifestyles. If we don’t put in the hours learning to enjoy and deploy language — to express ourselves, describe a situation, argue a case — we risk widening the gulf between our betters and the rest of us.
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I accept that what I’m saying may seem irrelevant. My ignorance of maths has been irrelevant too — even though I’ve worked with numbers most of my life. I spent a few years doing tedious marine stability, trim, displacement and hull speed calculations — by hand, with a calculator. When personal computers arrived I graduated to spreadsheets. Double entry book-keeping isn’t a problem.
But these things are important if you have kids. You don’t want doors to close on them before they’ve even left school. Our betters aren’t really better than us, but they think they are and they treat us accordingly. Best your kids are able to join them. Or stand up to them.
So get them to the gym. That’s where their betters are.
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While you’re at it, teach them the difference between the active and passive voice! Compare something I wrote elsewhere:
I neglected to tie down a truckload of soft drinks.
With this:
A truckload of soft drinks was not tied down.
One leads to, “I have no idea why I wasn’t sacked”, the other absolutely nowhere except to help me evade responsibility.
Incidentally I don’t think you should necessarily take advice from academics. Mr Reynolds, one of my politics lecturers, was very strait laced.
“Why, then, were there so many parties?” I asked in an essay for him (political parties, not Saturday night hoolies).
“Try to avoid these rather oratorical flourishes,” Mr Reynolds responded, which I thought was a bit Calvinist.
“I intend to argue…” I wrote.
“It is intended to argue,” he preferred. The bloody passive voice again, managing to be both ugly and unhelpful.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of style. Personal preference. Aesthetics rather than rules — the hardest thing if you haven’t done much reading, as you don’t know what’s out there to like.
As with ceramics, bookbinding or photography, some people will like what you do, some — hopefully less — won’t. I like to read things back a few times. If sentences roll off my tongue easily, hopefully they’ll roll off yours easily too. Sometimes repeating a word or phrase comes across with a flourish, sometimes it’s just jarring. Sometimes an ugly sentence can be renovated, sometimes it needs to be thrown out.
Sometimes it’s just the passage of time. I was much fonder of colons and semi-colons 50 years ago — these days I prefer double ems. And sentence fragments.
Well, that was fun, but I’m pontificating. Again. Back to the shredding