💬 Let Speaking Teach Writing (James Moffett on Discourse)
How do we help students stuck at initial phases of writing?
Teach Writing Tomorrow addresses major myths and misconceptions about teaching writing. It will move from attitudes to actions and mindset to methods, showing how any teacher, regardless of their own perceived ability or creativity, can teach writing tomorrow.
The Stuck Student Writer
Talk is cheap, but writing isn't. We think nothing of speaking—expressing ideas with each exhale—yet transcribing those ideas? It's a cosmic chasm many fear: The distance between the mind, the mouth, and the printed page.
Here's a common sight: The stuck student writer. They sit paralyzed. Static. The blank page or screen. The frozen pencil. Silence. Frustration. Ideas blocked by barriers unseen.
Schools thrive on disconnection, divorcing content from context. We split writing from spelling, from grammar, from literature. As each part separates and isolates, the tasks consume the calendar. In isolation, each separate part consumes the calendar. Integrated tasks, however, do not.
How do you help the stuck writer? How do we bridge that chasm between the mind, the mouth, and the printed page? What if the secret were simple? What if the secret lay in an out of print, tie-dyed book from 1983?
Why are we not afraid to talk but petrified to write? What if discussion served as the precondition to all written fluency?
Meet James Moffett
In my last post for Teach Writing Tomorrow, "101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI)" introduced a question and thought experiment from my first year of teaching: What if you could lesson plan once and never lesson plan again? The 101 Random Lesson Plans served as proof of concept, as future posts build towards 101 Purposeful Lesson Plans.
While my full thought experiment is forthcoming, this post will focus on a smaller, easier question: Where did I get my categories from? The fourteen boil down to four: reading, writing, and discussion (speaking and listening).
If you teach English but haven’t studied James Moffett, you’ve been running barefoot and blindfolded over Legos. Moffett (1929-1996) has been undergoing a badly needed renaissance lately. Thanks to the hard work of scholars Jonathan M. Marine and Paul Rogers, Moffett's works have been republished online, alongside the 2024 publication of two Moffett books: The Legacy of James Moffett and Toward a Re-Emergence of James Moffett's Mindful, Spiritual, and Student-Centered Pedagogy. (I'm still scheming to get review copies!)
Moffett's most important work, Teaching the Universe of Discourse, advances English not as subject, but mastering "symbol systems" (xii). He doesn't just present a prescriptive list for teaching, but weaves a coherent theory of composition grounded in abstraction into a connected theory of media. Whereas many English textbooks rely on “dummy sentences” and detached exercises, Moffett explains how to open source learning about language from practically anywhere.
And yet the most profound idea comes through his intellectual humility. As he states in the Forward, "What follows in these pages must, as an individual endeavor, be very imperfect; the ideas await correct and completion by other minds" (xiv).
Moffett published four editions of a methods book, Student-Centered Language Arts and Reading, K-13, between 1968 and 1992. His tie-dyed 1983 edition contains many sections later omitted from his fourth and final edition, including an introduction which grounds English through how we experience information. This sprawling, playful tome includes everything from book binding to elementary theater to composition across many conceivable—and overlooked—mediums.
In short, what Teaching the Universe of Discourse provides in theory, his Student-Centered Language Arts provides for hands-on practice. Just not that (garbage) last edition.
Since this text remains out of print, I'll quote generously without apology. Moffett's prose exudes a smooth, organic, and earthy flow and his word choices prove deliberate yet uncommon.
From Coding to Composition: Language Arts and Discourse
Language is a medium of communication and follows the general principles of all communication. This means, for one thing, that its superstructure is the set of relations among sender, receiver, and message. For another thing, it means that language shares common characteristics with other media of communication. All media communicate something from beyond themselves, some raw experiences that has to be coded into the medium. Thus, the content or messages of language are themselves nonverbal. [Emphasis mine.] People code their yet unsymbolized experience (“raw”) into one or another medium according to the graphic, acoustical, electronic, or other material traits of the medium. But before they can code into any medium they have to think the experience in some way, not consciously perhaps, not yet in words, but abstract it and organize it in some form in the mind. (4)
Moffett grounds English through inner speech and spirals outwards to communication and media. All information starts in the pre-verbal world of experience and moves from the mind to the mouth to the printed word. Unlike today's incoherent and destructive standards-based approach, Moffett stresses integration and application, along with community.
Moffett relies on a simple tool: abstraction. Moffett, like Neil Postman and others, was heavily influenced by the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski. Korzybski, who wrote Science and Sanity, popularized abstraction as a tool for communication. If you’re interested, I suggest titles Language and Thought in Action (Hayakawa), Drive Yourself Sane (Kodish), Awareness and Action (Lahman), and others.
Everything begins before language in raw experience. When we move from the visual to the verbal, we "code" information through three stages: conceptualization, verbalization, and literacy. Each level includes the sender, message, and receiver, which Martin Buber would paraphrase as I-you-it relations. Let’s run through each level.
The first level, conceptualization, includes the pre-verbal world where we constitute sender, message, and receiver. “Thinking,” Moffett explains, “is self-communicating” (4). The second level, verbalization, includes the vocal comprehension and composition. This level “is oral but necessarily external, since one also verbalizes to oneself” (5). This may initially confuse some, since we associate composition with writing, but composition is merely expressed in writing. In the third level, literacy, “people encode from oral speech to writing and decide from writing into oral speech” (5). He continues, “This level is derivative, because it is an overlay of printed symbols upon vocal symbols” (5). The implications become clear in action:
Much confusion in language teaching has resulted from the fact that anyone reading or writing necessarily merges all three levels of coding. Teachers have too often assumed that when a student is performing at the level of literacy, the difficulties he has must be of that level, whereas the difficulties may be of any one of the three levels or of all three at once. When composing and comprehending are done orally, then word recognition and transcribing can be ruled out, and the difficulties can be seen to be in the conceptualizing of experience or in the verbalization of thought. (5)
Literacy blends all three levels, but we often mistake cause and effect, source and expression. Many students struggle with decoding yet comprehend easily while others decode easily yet struggle to comprehend. (This passage anticipates the simple view of reading.) Understanding these three levels helps troubleshoot and know where to apportion our time and interventions. Regardless, these three levels move to four categorical activities:
“Language Arts” is what the language arts are—speaking, listening, reading, and writing. There are four activities because people encode and decode language at two levels—oral and written. We have to keep in mind the fifth activity, thinking, which grounds the other four. (6)
Communication means the two-way flow of information between encoding and decoding, composition and comprehension. Taken symbolically and orally, this means the four Language Arts of reading, writing, speaking, and listening (6). (Thinking, he explains, comprises the ever present fifth category.) Together, Moffett expresses these four categories through an oft unused term, "discourse" (8).
Be careful disregarding Moffett’s careful word choices. I only paraphrase here for shameless brevity and alliteration: mind for conceptualization, mouth for verbalization, and the printed page for literacy.
Moffett’s theory of discourse becomes an easy framework for media, uniting everything from journals to letters to plays to essays, moving ever outwards in audience and distance. In passing mention, why books don’t bridge Moffett and McLuhan is beyond me. So where should English aim?
Language arts or English should be a kind of intellectual “homeroom,” where a student can see the totality of his symbolic life. It is the one place where all forms and contents can be learned in relation to each other—the fictional and the actual side by side, comprehension and composition as reverses of each other, spoken and written speech interplaying, language competing with and complementing other media. If the rest of the curriculum is to be divided up mostly by topics, then language arts must not only be the guardian of literature but the patron of general communication process. (21)
Moffett’s English revolves around “symbol system,” which integrates anything within the system. This ideal stands higher than politically-driven, prescriptivist standards whose fickle winds rewrite textbooks for profit. (Math, he explains, is the other symbol system.) As such, he blends and ignores traditional subject lines, encouraging playful and student-driven exploration wherever inquiry leads. This reflects an applied, composition-driven epistemology driven by simple questions about sources of knowledge. Subjects become smaller discourses but remain fundamentally connected as knowledge. School divisions, he might argue, harm more than help. At bare minimum, they discourage learning.
As the English teacher with a Philosophy degree, I could write a dissertation here. Yet my Generalist leanings do me no favors.
This begs the question: “But what does integrating all “subjects” through language amount to practically?” he asks (41).
History and science can really be defined by the level of abstraction to which material is symbolized. History is what happened, or True Stories. Science is what happens, or Information. Abstracting further from either of these produces Ideas, higher-level generalizations and theories about people and things that carry history and science into philosophy. In other words, some “subjects” are just different areas of discourse, different levels of abstracting into language. (41)
Moffett didn’t just see the big picture—he illuminated the canvas upon which knowledge is painted.
Side Issues
When writing this post, other fascinating side issues kept growing like weeds. But to keep it focused, I avoided straying too far. Each would make wonderful stand alone pieces. (And I'd jump to write a dissertation on the third!)
1. Moffett’s universe of discourse, which connects composition through abstraction of ideas and distance from audience. Phrased differently, his framework does for writing what a unified theory might do for physics. Yet sadly, many teachers exclusively chase the cave shadows of tested writing rather than connect other discourses.
2. Moffett's classroom design, which focuses on three I's: individualization (individualized paths without whole-class instruction), interaction (language taught in community), integration (English as symbol system). In today's data-blind world where "student-centered" means teaching from liturgical, corporatized manuals, I'd love to explain its antithesis.
3. Moffett's critique on learning objectives, if they should exist at all, remain as general as possible. The problem lies in politics: The rule makers don’t teach, and terminology invades from “modern industrial management” (24). This pseudo-scientific sound fools the public as teachers become proctors. Increasing specificity becomes increasing complexity.
4. Moffet's composition-driven, folk epistemology, which dissolves subject lines and establishes what we can know around a handful simple questions. I would love to trace this theme across works and explore what teaching without subject divisions. If paired with a theory of text structure, I could write a cookbook of essays.
And I’m not kidding: I could write a dissertation on #4. When paired with text structure and the nitty-gritty of how other subjects arrange stereotypical essays, this could produce some fascinating results and exercises for first-year college students.
Application #1: Say What You Want to Write
As students struggle to start writing, Moffett would be quick to point out that composition is distinctly oral as we "code" information into symbol systems. He explains:
The more serious confusion concerns the general composition act of putting thought into speech. It is easy to fall into the mistaken notion that composition can be practiced only while writing. This compares to the fallacy that comprehension can be practiced only by reading. People talking are composing; they are putting ideas into words and sentences. Furthermore, even when just thinking, alone, people are composing to the extent that they are verbalizing their thought. A written composition is some edited version of a person's inner speech. Someone writing a composition is transcribing her own revised inner speech, and inner speech develops in a very large measure from outer speech. A writer is both author and secretary. If you can help your students to regard their inner speech as something they can in some edited form transcribe any time to paper, they will take a giant step toward becoming fluent writers. (177)
What does this mean? Let’s return to the stuck student and the blank page. Sometimes closing the chasm between the mind and the blank page means talking. Discussion. The solution to frustrated silence and writers block means conversation. If all written speech is transcribed inner speech, the environment should help translate and transcribe.
Note: For more, check out his 1981 essay "Writing, Inner Speech, and Meditation" from Coming on Center. This expands inner speech to a cosmic act, integrating philosophy, religion, and psychology.
Don't overlook or underestimate this step. All language codes experience into the verbal world. Moving from mind to mouth quite literally means adding language. But that inner speech of conceptualization doesn't magically become literacy. The work means translation—chaining ideas to speech to text. And if we demand effects but ignore causes, then the blank page will inspire paralysis. Every time.
Thus, properly viewed, writing rests on discourse instead of itself. Ideas must move between reading, writing, speaking, and listening. (For ease, I blend speaking and listening to "discussion.") From a planning perspective, this means exploring central questions through the categories of discourse, almost like a checklist. Each class should include every element.
When my students write, big picture questions feature near-daily discussions. Unless they were sick or sleeping, most should be able to recite big picture questions and answers. We continually rehearse main points and move between discussions and smaller pieces. The challenging part translates or scribes a coherent opinion into literacy—into symbol system form. Otherwise, I expect my students to know the big picture.
If the blank page becomes a wall, I encourage students to tell me what they want to write. I model the translation. In many cases, I act as scribe with varying levels of detail. I never say more than what they say—only the essence. Once students see the connection between their spoken thoughts and written thoughts, they excitedly run off and write away.
Jumping off script, I realized this intuitively in college. When vexed I'd walk to a friend, recite the question, then rehearse what I wanted to say. I'd never solicit opinions, just open ears. With blogging and speaking recently, many early drafts start with "I want to say" as a frame. The rest just spills out.
So how does this translate for others? Keep reading. While this post introduces the idea, my initial thought experiment introduces the logistics.
Application #2: Abandon Traditional Prewriting
Sharon Crowley, author of The Methodical Memory and Composition in the University (each absolute gems!), introduces the problems of current-traditional rhetoric and rhetorical mode. Textbooks, she explains, have been virtually unquestioned for two centuries. They each copy each other like echo chambers, and have long since been separated from their historical causes. As such, they aren’t just ineffective, but downright destructive. Not to mention terrible. Very little thinking occurs.
Years ago I abandoned traditional prewriting of Brainstorm, Outline, Write, Revise (BOWR) because time after time, year after year, it just never worked. Instead, Moffett offers a more hands-on approach:
For students who find so-called creative writing a difficult process, who assert they "have no ideas" or "can't write," one process that seems simple enough is to transpose mode, to rewrite into another genre something they have read and liked. (166)
This is a more challenging writing activity than it might first appear. For in changing a selection to another genre you are confronted with the limitations and possibilities of a different point of view, an altered scope, and a new ratio of scene to summary. The students who transpose mode in this way need not be told this; they will discover it as they work. What they learn in changing genre can be transferred to other writing tasks in which they face such decisions as point of view, scope, and the relation of scene to summary... (166)
Of course, rewriting prose or poetry as a script automatically shifts the medium from book to stage, radio, film, or television... (166)
Are you stuck writing an essay? Say what you want to say to a friend, then write a short letter instead. Or perhaps a diary entry. Or perhaps a script. It really doesn’t matter. Just rewrite it as something else.
Transformation teaches through contrast. Changing mediums imposes different limitations, both in convention and information itself. I've used this method for years when teaching dialogue. Students begin by transcribing movie clips then rewriting them in short story from, moving from dramatic conventions to adding quotation marks. This lays the foundation for using speech as evidence, layering in-text citations.
While outlining helps organization, outlining (BOWR step two) assumes too much. Instead, transformation removes the "pre" from "prewriting" and focuses on developing ideas. Let writing be writing. Moving from one medium to another necessarily adds length considering some forms carry more information than others. Rewriting an email as an essay, for instance, opens possibilities and adds length with a formal tone. Yet rewriting an essay to an email forces brevity and drops formal conventions for personal conventions.
Aside: I've always thought outlines work best after writing. They reflect backwards through revision, predicting which ideas might sequence best forward. In timed writes, I encourage students to abruptly shift from prose to outlines and back as ideas present themselves.
Lately, for sheer variety and curiosity, I've been using invented dialogue for analysis. Students take a Twenty Questions assignment and narrow to six or seven, arranging them to form Platonic-style conversation. The result, a structured 14-20 lines, analyzes deeper than most essays with the fewest possible words. (In the future, I would love to expand to 35-40 lines, but I imagine that will take a different framework entirely.)
Preview: Five Ways to Let Speaking Teach Writing
My next post will describe five categorical ways speaking teaches writing in my classroom. This list won't be exhaustive—Should I aim for ten?—but will serve to illustrate the deeper principles introduced here. My working list goes as follows:
1. Discuss daily journals. Let anticipatory writing become anticipatory discussions. This doesn’t mean show and tell or hours of whole-class discussions. Even a thirty-second partner talk means full participation twice over.
2. Transcribing dialogue. As the year starts, I love transcribing movie clips. It not only provides the perfect window to conversation, but naturally invites in-depth discussion over applied punctuation and sentence-ing.
3. Invented dialogue. I’ve been experimenting here lately, having students write structured 14-20 line dialogues over a prescribed topic. As a puzzle, it’s far more accessible than the academic writing only approach, and it really really forces them to think. Besides, this once commonplace convention has disappeared from public consciousness.
4. Focus on questions over curriculum. When students discuss what they write about literature, we cover content in context. Writing as both means and ends frames any standard through application. Focusing on big questions merely maintains the focus on “big ideas.”
5. Regular Peer Review. Peer review is flawed but rarely a complete waste of time. Actively discussing what they wrote means, for a class of twenty, inviting twenty-one graders rather than one. And if twenty students fix one mistake each, the waters rise for all.
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