Riding my bicycle on the Neuse River Trail Saturday, I was delighted to hear the North Raleigh Christian Academy’s Marching Band practicing out on their athletic fields. Then on Sunday, unable to park near my destination, I had a pleasant walk through the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus and saw why there was no parking available—it was move-in day for students. The North Carolina academic year is clearly underway.
These signs of students approaching campus made me think about the amount of writing they are about to engage in—writing is, after all, an important way to learn and a key way to demonstrate what one has learned. Students will write impromptu responses for a given class, more developed essays on assigned topics and research papers resulting from long-term projects. This is especially true of high-school seniors and first-year college students. I write to alert you of this basic fact and to present the glad tidings of an easy way for you to become well prepared for these projects, starting right now, long before they are even assigned.
High school seniors know that they will be writing frequently, often in-class, and they know that they will be assigned a Research Paper. These assignments, although prompted, often allow (and even require) a great deal of student discretion—that is, you will have some leeway regarding your topic selection and general approach to the assignment. This is also true of the SAT and ACT writing tests college-bound seniors will take and of the excellent college-application essays they will want to write. At this point in their academic careers, high-school seniors have written enough prompted essays to know exactly what I am talking about.
First-year college students will take an English composition course in the fall semester and then another in the spring. Each semester, then, they can expect to write some six to eight well developed essays, one of which will be a major research paper. This does not account for the writing all the other classes—biology, psychology, history, computer science, anthropology, mathematics—will require. Academic success depends, like never before, on writing well, on-the-fly, like it is second nature.
Experienced writers often advise aspiring writers thus: “Write what you know.” That is excellent advice. But, although I may have saved a beleaguered humanity yet again as an excellent Master Chief, although I can execute a flawless caballerial, although I can rebuild a carburetor, speak Spanish like a native or calculate a stock’s variance and standard deviation, play a violin or sketch a portrait—all admirable and useful skills, I may be stumped when asked to write about the impact of banking regulation upon the unemployment rate or of the drug war on current prison policy. To more successfully apply the advice, “write what you know,” I need to develop what I know.
You have access to an easy way to do just that—to become conversant and intelligent about a wide array of topics immediately useful to you as a writer facing a crucial academic year. Take in five minutes of news per day. You can do that while doing something else—as you are commuting to school, washing the dishes, mowing the lawn or working out, get out your device and listen to the news. The best time to do this is at the beginning of the newscast—if you are using the radio, that’s at the top of almost every hour on almost every radio station; on television, the first five minutes of a newscast contain headline accounts of the most important stories; if it’s a podcast, you can pick when you listen. The New York Times will send you a free daily email with their headlines and a sentence or two about each story—you can read that while waiting in line. The point is to become a regular news consumer for a little while every day.
Pro Tip: If your news reporter is shouting or seems angry, you are watching news entertainment—that’s fun but not very helpful. Try to consume news delivered calmly, however alarming the topic. You may have to experiment until you find the right dispassionate and responsible source.
This habit will expose you to a wide variety of current topics that will be relevant to almost everything you will be studying. If you listen every day, you will come across a story related to something you are studying and that people care about, that maybe you will care about as you become more aware of it. Taking in the news on a daily basis will also let you see how an event unfolds over time, how our interpretation of what is happening in the world changes as additional facts become available. You will come to understand the complexities of issues and will be able to discuss them intelligently, better able to support your ideas with facts rather than feelings. Those five minutes will expose you to many stories over time, some of which you will become passionate about and can follow more closely.
Warning: sometimes your five minutes will become twenty minutes as a story engages your interest and you find yourself paying attention to the more in-depth story following the headline summary. This is desirable because you will want to spend this time engaging your mind in something you are interested in and, while doing that, you are accidentally becoming a better writer.
This year is an election year. I guarantee that election issues will come up in class discussions and as topics for essays because teachers and professors think it is important for students to know about events shaping the country. Politicians provide excellent examples of persuasive techniques used well and badly—to emulate or avoid—and teachers need such examples to teach writing. Five minutes of news per day will put you well ahead of this game.
Discuss your 5 minutes of news with a friend on the way to class.
Finally, develop your awareness of the news by discussing the most interesting stories with whomever is around you—your friends, your little sister, your parents, your roommates, possibly a teacher. You will even be able to raise your hand and contribute meaningfully to class discussions. This will all give you practice developing a point of view about lots of topics, understanding how other people’s point of view differs from your own and persuading them to see value of your position. You will get better at convincing people based on sound reasoning using hard data, which is the point of all that writing you will be doing this academic year.
So, starting now, before you even get an assignment or learn what your essay prompt is going to be, become better at writing what you know by knowing more.
1. Take in 5 minutes of news per day (while doing something else).
2. Give additional attention to those stories and events that interest you most (or seem most relevant to what you are studying).
3. Discuss those stories and events with people.
If that high-school marching band and those incoming college students start taking these three simple steps today, they will see positive results by the end of the semester. So will you.
