How to Think like Shakespeare by Scott Newstok

Author:Scott Newstok
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Epictetus knew it even earlier:

Every habit and every faculty is confirmed and strengthened by the corresponding acts, the faculty of walking by walking, that of running by running. If you wish to have a faculty for reading, read; if for writing, write. . . . So generally if you wish to acquire a habit for anything, do the thing.20

Robert Southey boils it down for us: It is by writing much that a person learns to write well.21

Given current educational orthodoxy that writing in this didactic way inhibits creativity and free expression, such a rhetorically saturated curriculum seems daunting to reproduce today. There are some hopeful exceptions, such as New Dorp High School, where all teachers in all disciplines receive training in writing. They begin with heavily scaffolded exercises at the level of the sentence before working up to progressive mastery through deliberate practice—in short, the same premises that governed the Progymnasmata. According to a scholar who has studied the school,

when teachers try taking instruction back to basics . . . they see big improvements in the quality of both thinking and writing, and that students can meet high school expectations when teachers slow down to show them how to write well. . . . what’s most counter-cultural, and not really in the knowledge base, is how to develop students at the level of the sentence and all the ramifications that has in terms of thinking and content.22

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