Writing & Gardening

Writing instruction is about error correction in the same way that gardening is about weeding. If a gardener spent all their time and energy weeding they would indeed have a clean garden: a clean and barren garden, plots and plots of empty dirt expect for where the occasional wind-blown flower planted itself.

Instead, gardeners spend most of their time seeding and planting and mulching and fertilizing and admiring, then digging up and moving just this one plant, and maybe pruning another back a wee bit or quite severely. Gardening is about promoting and nurturing growth. Writing instruction is about nurturing growth in the flora and fauna of the mind. Good writing instruction requires energies directed towards the blossoming of intellects.

Yet, even the most fecund of gardens suffers if it is not weeded. My roses and herbs can’t preen when Japanese knotweed moves in. I must spend some time weeding, lest the weeds obscure my blooms. Similarly, when mechanical errors clutter up the page, we need to teach our students how to weed. “This! This here is the dread knotweed of tangled syntax! Yank it out! And watch out for effect/affect. You get them confused and you look like an amateur.” Though weeding isn’t gardening, it is part of the process; alas it is the part that most commands the attention of our students.

Think about a new gardener friend. When you tour your garden with her and wax eloquently on the proper mulch for peonies, is she listening? No. She is pointing at the pelargoniums and asking, “Is that a weed?” “No, you are thinking of buttercup,” you absent-mindedly reply as you redirect her attention to the peonies. Your friend keeps distracting you with weed questions. She finds comfort in getting a handle on what not to grow. It is learnable, approachable, memorizable. She wants to learn rules, while you are trying to teach beauty. You want to say, “Grow something! Anything! We’ll tidy it up later!” She is thinking, “I just don’t want any weeds.”

Somewhere in the process of being gardening mentors, we’ll need to address her keen interest in weeds. We can’t ignore it. We can, though, show her weeding’s proper place in a gardener’s timeline: dream, plant, fertilize, water, observe, transplant, prune, fertilize some more, plant some more. Weeding is done along the way, something to keep busy between these other tasks, and maybe one grand push before opening the garden for viewing. A gardener yanks the obvious weeds as she prunes, pulls out the knotweed as she fertilizes. Occasionally she will consult her Sunset Western Garden book to refine her weed identification skills, or merely ask a fellow gardener.

No one ever compliments a garden because it is weed-free. Yet our students often expect that a weed-free essay is their, and our, aim. When we can help our students see that good writing is about having fruitful ideas that play with light and shadow and color in an intriguing or charming ways, that good writing is lush and redolent with suggestive aromas and implications, and that good writing results from rich and thoughtful fertilizer and a generous amount of time to allow for growth, then we will have done our job.