Teaching with Writelike ARCHIVED NOV 2023

Why start with narrative?

Narrative writing generally seems to be politically and socially undervalued relative to persuasive writing.

It's like there's a belief that narrative is easy—in narrative, you can just make stuff up and its only purpose is entertainment—whereas persuasive writing is difficult and important—argument requires knowledge of content and facts, it requires structure and strength, it's used to shape laws and decisions of national import, it lets you bend the world to your will etc etc.

Persuasive writing is for leaders; narrative is for... 'entertainers'. 

We could talk about the actual social and economic value of narrative and its centrality in society, including the politics that so often dismisses it, but let's skip all that to focus on a pedagogical argument for narrative. 

You can't be persuasive without story

Narrative skill is an essential precursor to persuasive skill. 

One reason for this is that persuasive writing often uses stories as a form of evidence, so writers need to craft a narrative in order to support the argument.

But a deeper reason is that we are a storytelling species, and narrative is the genre that perhaps most naturally matches our experience of the world. 

We experience the world as people performing actions, located in a place, and sequenced in time, in a chain of continual cause and effect, with emotional consequences that allow us to interpet the meaning and value of what has occurred. 

Narrative writing is the craft of taking this experience and representing it to another person in text, and this requires a host of skills: observing detail, summarising, elaborating, sequencing, positioning, changing point of view, providing commentary, making valuations, and more.

Just the act of writing a scene with multiple characters in action—trying to get all that information into the right order and right level of detail so that a reader can make sense of it—that is challenging writing.

It doesn't matter what the story is about, where it is set, whether it is funny or serious—it's the act of observing, imagining, sequencing, and expanding that is the challenge.

These same skills are essential to report writing, analysis, and argument writing, and while you can and should teach the skills within each of these genres, narrative provides what is probably the most accessible starting point.

By beginning with narrative, we make it easier to learn fundamental skills, and we make it easier to learn the genres that build on this foundation.

We will get to the other genres

Creating Writelike lessons is a lot of work. We need to select snippets, highlight patterns, change our minds, select new snippets, highlight new patterns, write instructions and examples, change snippets and highlights again, write new instructions and examples, build it all in the system—it takes time. Sometimes we toss out entire courses because they don't work.

Which is a way of saying: we have to sequence our work, so we are focusing on narrative writing to begin with.

We want to establish a good foundation here, and then we will build into report, analysis and persuasive writing.

All in good time!