How to be an amazing writer.

I'm reading Write like the masters : emulating the best of Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, and others by William Cane.

He says that starting in the 1930s or so teaching rhetoric was phased out of the education system. Teachers decided to suddenly promote "originality" when it comes to writing. "Find your own voice." "Be unique." "Never, never plagiarize."

The problem is that the great literary masters studied rhetoric, emulated their contemporaries and copied the style of legendary writers before them.

The current advice to find your own voice has made us worse writers. Cane argues that before you can be a "unique" writer, you need to copy the voice and style of the greats.

My own take is that writers today are just as good, if not better, than they were back in 1800s or earlier. But I see his point. A central tenant of neuro-linguistic programming is to find someone who's good at something, break down what they do exactly, and copy ("model") it.

If writers did this, perhaps they'd be even better. On the other hand it would require some tough, tough reading. The literary greats weren't known for writing short, exciting, concise, minimalist books.

We've gone overboard on literacy.

I was just talking to a teacher here at the elementary school and he showed me the grade 5 curriculum. Physical education was a half a page of goals and instructions. Social studies was a page long, same with science and math.

Reading and writing was 3 or 4 pages long. He said, "We've gone overboard on literacy." I asked him why and he said, "Because women have started writing the curriculum."

Then he got more serious and said, "Because kids don't read books anymore."

I said, "Is there a correlation between the length and detail of the curriculum and success at reading?"

He said, "Yes, an inverse one." He said a lot of the teachers don't bother with it - it's simply too detailed, unpractical and incomprehensible.

Then he gave me an example. "Imagine if the phys. ed curriculum was 4 pages long and kids were taught pre-kicking strategies before kicking a soccer ball, and kids were evaluated on 4 or 5 different aspects of kicking a ball."

I said, "Kids wouldn't want to do it. It would be annoying. They'd want to go read a book."

He nodded his head and I went to the washroom.