I’m going
back over Stephen King’s On Writing,
which I highly recommend not only to aspiring writers but to English educators.
In particular I’m thinking about the toolbox King talked about. Vocabulary,
words, are an integral part of that toolbox, probably the most important part.
I also can’t help but think how many of my students don’t have the vocabulary
they should for the level they are at, and they have come to where they are
without learning how to expand their own vocabulary, and how to use what they
do know effectively.
During the
last semester I had an assignment about why essays are important to write, and
how they should be graded. It was an experiment that bore some very interesting
fruit, including a student who advocated looking up more advanced words in a
thesaurus in order to impress the teacher.
I felt my
guts seize up even as my brain flashed to King’s toolbox. This was exactly the
wrong approach to take. The nuances of meaning don’t come through in such a
casual look at a thesaurus, and end up making the writer sound less intelligent
instead of more.
But this
attitude told me something, as well as reading some articles about teaching and
the crime scene interactive fiction project I ran: students don’t have the
tools necessary to expand their vocabulary in the right way. It should be something of an osmotic
process where people read, ponder what they’ve read, define new words from
context, and assimilate them into a vocabulary.
My students
rarely read, and when they do the process is more akin to skimming than an
immersive experience. Consequently, when confronted with unfamiliar words, they
are skipped over instead of processed. They have no use for looking up words be
it in a physical dictionary, online dictionary, or even using Google to define
the word.
So I’ve been brainstorming up a new type of assignment
that would require my students to use dictionaries. I want them to become
familiar with the process, to become comfortable and practiced with looking up
words. They need to learn how to sound out words and properly look them up.
They need to become aware that the word threw is the past tense of throw, and
not a spelling for through.