Oct 22, 2015 4 min read

I was sitting with a university student, going over his latest writing assignment, trying but failing to explain what was wrong.

I read the sentence, read it again, scratched my head, tapped my pen on the paper. Nothing.

“How much do you read?” I asked.

“Just what I have to for class, and on websites,” he said.

I looked at the sentence again, sighed.

“I can’t help you if you don’t read.”

That’s the truth of it. To be a better writer, you have to read more.

This is a significant concern for me – something I brood about every day. How do I help students to become better writers? As a professor of writing at a university, I am always looking at student writing. In the classroom, we talk about the basics of grammar and syntax: how to recognize a dangling participle; how to avoid the passive voice; how to eliminate wordiness and redundancy; why we should (like Hemingway said) avoid adverbs; the difference between its and it’s, for goodness sake.

Those are the basics, and I try to dispense with them in the first few weeks of the semester. I’m interested in teaching about meaning and message and understanding the audience. Making the writing lean and muscular.

By the time a student gets to his second or third year of college, his writing is technically correct.

But I’ve noticed problems with syntax, with the way the sentence is supposed to fit together – how the words should flow. That’s the part of writing that can’t be taught. To get the feel of the language, you must have it in your brain, knitted into the bones of your thinking. Just as a photographer’s eye must be trained to recognize how images should be composed within a frame, a writer must rely on recognition of how a sentence looks on the page, and how it sounds in the ear when it’s read and re-read.

It’s a lot like muscle memory for a tennis player. After 10,000 serves, the correct movement becomes second nature. Your muscles have learned how to do it, and you don’t have to deconstruct the action every time.

“Writing is like that,” I told my student.

The more he reads good, solid writing, the more the rhythm and syntax of it gets into the muscle memory of his brain, and the sentences will flow out the right way.

I share this concern with other writing teachers. We are frustrated when faced with student work that defies easy editing and correction.

“They don’t read enough,” these teachers and I say, sometimes in unison.

We take that back. They do read: texts and tweets and web blurbs and snippets of graphic content. If we’d add up all the words the millennials read in a day, they might surpass the word count of a few chapters of a biography, or the word count of a solid piece in a newspaper. But what I’m talking about is reading, the kind that takes concentration and effort, the kind that invites you to re-read a passage a few times to get the meaning or just to enjoy the feel of its rhythm again.

(Why no adverbs, you ask? As Hemingway said, adverbs are lazy. It’s better to put the action in the verb.)

To help my student, I assigned him a long magazine article to read. He is not to write a report about it, but to let it soak in, to mark his muscle memory, to stay with him. To read good writing so he can do good writing.

And that, as Hemingway would never say, really, really works.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.