The Corona Diaries: Day Sixty-Eight

The Corona Diaries: Day Sixty-Eight

The other day we watched The Talk of the Town.

In it, Ronald Colman, a renowned law professor, dictates his thoughts to newly acquired Girl Friday Jean Arthur. As I was watching, I had the visual right in front of me. He is dictating, she is writing. In other words, he is not writing down his thoughts.

If there is one piece of evidence in the mystery of the struggling writer it is the fact that thoughts come into our head more easily than they do on paper. In fact, I was just reading about this in my search for more struggling writer research: in the Language Experience Model, it is found that students have more spoken vocabulary than written words available to them.

Which is where Patsy Cooper, and When Stories Come to School, comes in. When I was working with a fourth grader who had a hard time getting his thoughts on paper, I discovered, in the brainstorming process, that he could tell me what he wanted to say, he was just having a hard time getting what he wanted to say on paper. That’s when we began the process of having him dictate his thoughts to me, which I wrote down in shorthand, then read back to him to write or type into a first draft.

Old school dictation, new school reality.