String of Pearls

I worked in the tutoring center at Cooper Union, a world-renowned scholarship school with only three majors: Art, Architecture and Engineering. Thus our students fell into three highly distinct types.

The Engineers tended to be foreign and had trouble with saying what they meant, grammar and sentence structure. The Architecture students never came- in all my years there, I saw only one. His mind was a blend of art and science and he had very little trouble with writing.

Then there were the Art students. They presented a very odd style.

The Art student writing style, reflecting the Art student mind and logic, was so creative that I never wanted to change it. Really I hated the thought of taming a creative, associative mind to be like everybody else.

In our Western tradition, a sentence makes a declarative statement. A paragraph supports one focused idea. An essay has one main Thesis Statement. Very straightforward, logical, precise. This essay then has an Introduction and Conclusion tying it all up.

Find the Thesis Statement

These students were so capable of expressing themselves in Art, but floundered helplessly in trying to make declarative statements or to follow logic, so necessary in their term papers.

Trying to find the Thesis Statement in an Art student's paper was like untangling a hopelessly tangled ball of yarn that is spread all over the living room floor. I never knew when one would turn up; and if it did, it was often something off and away on a different topic.

The strangest part were the sentences. Rather than making declarative statements, the Art students usually just strung words together- nouns, verbs, adjectives- like a string of pearls. Meaning was derived from the associative combination of the words, like poetry.

I looked online for a sample from an Art blog, and in no time at all, found this. It makes a lot more sense than most of what I saw at Cooper Union, but you get the idea:

"Today from the echoes of burst bubbles there is a call of arms to the American Artist. There is a corner office vacant for the cultural engineers to build bridges from the media hype to the reality of communities depraved of meaning."

Writing is thinking. Writing in a logical way means you're thinking in a logical way. Writing in an associative way shows associative thinking. To guide a student to a logical style is to change their thinking and close off the free flow of the juice.

5-paragraph theme

It would be a shame to change these unique ways of thinking. I simply did not want to put them into the "five paragraph theme" mode that is taught in a sort of paint-by-numbers way in writing courses. It's a real dilemma in teaching, how much to force a student to conform. Each teacher has to make that decision for themselves.

The argument is that if we allow the student their natural, often scarcely coherent style, they will fail in life, for life demands a certain way of writing and thinking. According to this argument, we have a responsibility to show the student how to conform, using their idiosyncratic style only for private purposes.

I was negligent as a tutor and teacher. I never had the heart to fiddle too much with what they brought in. Besides, the job of transforming one thought-style to the other is formidable. It means "translating" each sentence. To see an Art student painfully find the declarative statement in their string of pearls always made me feel guilty. I ignored the guilt of neglecting my "responsibility."