Rowing against the current... and losing to the waves

As I was wrapping up my (what I thought) was my final student media critique of the summer, I felt that sense of, well, despair, that I often get from reading lots of student writing from across the country (from Florida to New Jersey to Illinois to California). 

One reason is that I find myself typing the same basic advice over and over again... and most of that advice is not recent in my thinking. We should try to anticipate what questions readers will have, for instance, and then find the answers, if possible. We should avoid simply TELLING  readers things in favor of SHOWING them. In other words, advice that they have heard many, many times in their educational lives.

And yet the writing remains consistently flat and lifeless and unsupported. I try to write narrative critiques, when I can, and I adopt first person plural to emphasize that we are all in this together (and to allow me to pretend that I am their media adviser simply going over last year's work as we prepare to start a new academic year). 

I assume that clear narrative writing is not taught enough in schools, particularly once kids get to middle school, but it's hard to imagine that students haven't picked up a few standard techniques storytellers use to engage with readers and viewers. 

One of my go-to pieces of advice is to think "more cinematically," which I explain by asking readers of the critiques to imagine they were writing a TV script. Unless they choose to use a narrator who simply states all the facts, they couldn't choose to TELL instead of SHOW. They would think of dialog. They would imagine a specific setting. They would create characters. They would introduce some sort of conflict, or at least set viewers up for a conflict to come.

Many times TV show or movie will simply drop viewers into an exciting or significant scene. A standard device is to open with something shocking or threatening, and then cut away to a quick screen of "x days or weeks earlier..." We were watching "1883," the first "Yellowstone" prequel a couple weeks ago, and in the very first scene we see a young girl shot in the midsection by an arrow during an attack on a wagon train.  

Spoiler alert: it did not turn out great... but it took 'til the penultimate episode (of 10) to get the context for the attack. That's a long time to wait in dread.

Still, so much better than the several stories I read this week that began with what I can only describe as "creative non-fiction," where the reporter imagines what it might be like to be a hockey player or point guard on the basketball team.

I often ask (somewhat rhetorically, since I have no idea who actually reads my comments) if staff members read many stories or watch TV or movies? Sounds a bit snarky, but when so many students (with the OK from their advisers) are fine publishing material that in no way resembles what they see every day... there is a definite disconnect.

I suppose I could add to the large number of "how to write a narrative" books out there... but who would read it? They aren't reading any of the others, that's certain.