This blog is for you.  Indeed, the entire Vantage Learning Community is for you.  We launched this new site to provide a virtual space for our growing community of users to meet one another, share success stories, and learn about writing.  As you navigate throughout the community, you’ll find blogs written for the users of the MY Access!® Home and School Editions.  You’ll also find forums for each group of users.  Fundamentally, this is your community, and we hope you find value in it.

By way of housekeeping, here are a few links you may want to explore:

• Rules for participation.  Since since this is a site where young people, teachers, and parents will congregate, please be civil and adhere to our posted rules.  Click here to read the community rules.
• The Home Edition users’ forum.  We’ve set up a few categories in the forum already, but the discussion is up to you.  We hope you’ll have a fun time posting messages and helping others in the forum.  Click here to jump to the forum.

The Home Edition Blog

We plan to begin by writing periodically about the writing process and how to use MY Access!®.  Soon, however, we hope to invite guests to contribute to the blog.  If you have something important to say to homeschoolers, or know someone who does, please contact us (info@myaccesshome.com).  Over the coming weeks and months, you can expect to find a few different kinds of posts in this blog.

First, we want to share with you what we know about writing and teaching writing and learn what you know.  Variously, the folks who make MY Access!® possible have years of experience as writers, teachers of writers, and parents of writers.  We also value the wisdom of our growing base of homeschool users and hope you will share your thoughts about writing with us!  Moreover, we will invite the collective insight of the thousands of students and teachers who use MY Access!® in schools around the globe.  No one of us will have all the answers, but together, we might get pretty close.

Second, we want to help you use MY Access!® effectively.  We built our software around proven research regarding process writing.  Your decision to homeschool demonstrates that you are concerned with the quality of your child’s education, and we want to do our best to assist you to integrate MY Access!® into your own curriculum. 

Finally, we want to have some fun!  Too often writing is viewed as an unpleasant chore, another one of those tasks that must be gotten out of the way before one can move on to more important things.  Students who enjoy writing, or are good at it, are too often lumped together with those lucky few who are born with artistic or musical talent.  Well, we see things a bit differently, as I will explain below, and want to find ways to make writing more fun for every student who uses MY Access!®

So, what is writing, really?

If I may share something of my own experience, I must say that I don’t recall enjoying writing until I went to college.  My earliest specific writing memory is from the third grade.  The assignment was to write a report about the state of Texas.  The problem was that I had waited until the very last minute to start the project.  The outcome was a not-too-pleasant-Sunday-afternoon-writing-marathon performed under the close supervision of my father.  I actually still have that report.  I don’t dare to read it, but it does have a decent crayon rendition of a long-horned steer on the cover page.

So, I know I wrote as a youngster.  I probably felt like other typical youngsters.  I suppose I did an okay job at writing.  But I was not a writer until I reached college.  So what was it about writing that changed for me?

I finally discovered that writing was more than just putting words down on paper; I realized I was putting myself down on paper.  Now, mind you, I am not a creative writer.  I don’t write stories, and I can’t write poetry.  Song lyrics are out too.  When it comes to that sort of writing, I let Hallmark take the lead.

I trained to write policy papers in which I analyzed important public policy problems (Social Security, energy and defense policy, etc.), weighed alternatives, and made recommendations.  This is about as dry as writing can be, at least short of writing about physics.

But through writing about “boring” social science issues, I found my voice.  And this is where I think we will find the most satisfactory understanding of what writing really is.  It is a voice.  It works with the voice you hear when you speak, and it works with the voice you hear in your head when you think.  It is your voice.

Writing is not just a by-product of our thinking or a record of our talking.  It is not the end result.  Rather, writing works with our thinking and our talking.  Philosophers might refer to this as a dialectical process.  Philosophers might also say that I am misusing that word.  But this is my voice, after all, so the word stands.  I see the dialectical process as a sort of dance.  We think of an idea (thesis), then we think of its opposite (antithesis), and then we combine the two into a new unifying idea (synthesis)**.

From a writing perspective, we think about an idea, and then we write about it.  Through writing about it, we are forced to think some more, maybe even talk to someone about it, and then write once again.  In this dance, our thinking evolves through a process of speaking and writing, of making our thoughts public and accessible to others, of revising our thoughts and trying again.  Through thinking, speaking, and writing, we become who we are.  There, I have said it.

I think I saw the beginnings of this process just the other day.  See, my two year old son loves fire trucks.  Several trucks were on display last Saturday at the grand opening of a supermarket near my house.  As my son watched the trucks, he pointed and babbled quite a bit.  He can’t speak much yet, and he certainly can’t write.  Coloring on the wall does NOT count.  But I know he can think.

As I watched my boy smile and stare at the trucks, I knew he was thinking of ideas — “That truck is big.  That ladder is very high.  The sirens are loud.  That firefighter is strong.”  Those thoughts were the basis of a conversation he would have started if he could talk.  Those thoughts were also the main ideas of an essay ***** “Why I Love Fire Trucks” which he would have drafted if he could write.

So what does all this have to do with a writing blog anyway?  Let’s extract a few points from these musings.

First, writing is fundamental.  There is something more to writing than what meets the eye on a piece of paper.  As we share more ideas about writing, let’s keep this in mind.  And as we teach our children, let’s let them in on the secret—sure writing can address a specific “academic standard,” but it can also be fun and help us get to know ourselves a little bit better.  From this understanding, it is but a bit further to see what “writing across the curriculum” really means.  We will deal with this subject again in a later blog.

Second, writing is a process.  Just as we, as writers, continue through the cycle of writing and redefining ourselves throughout our personal, academic, and professional lives, each essay we write will cycle through a process a few times until it can be considered complete.  And, I’ll have more to say about this writing process in my next post.

You can comment on this blog below, or click here to jump to the forum and start a discussion about my take on “what is writing, really?”

** This is one of those words I picked up along the way in college.  Here is how a dictionary defined it: “The process especially associated with Hegel of arriving at the truth by stating a thesis, developing a contradictory antithesis, and combining and resolving them into a coherent synthesis.”  Sounds like a dance of ideas to me!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Because Writing Matters... At Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.