Writing with both sides of the brain
By Randy Koch
Before I got a degree and started teaching writing, I worked for nearly ten years as a maintenance man at Valley View Manor Nursing Home in Lamberton , Minnesota . I mowed VVM's sprawling lawns, repaired rooftop furnaces in the dead of winter, mopped up urine and vomit, and dissembled overflowing toilets only to find a snuff tin or a bar of soap caught in the pipe. I knew the residents -- Erna, who collected dead flies in a napkin; Charlie, who slammed chairs around in the bathroom when he didn't want to take a bath; and Emil, who leaned on his cane as he tended his roses in the front yard. But it's the effects of aging and disease that I remember most: how Parkinson's caused Ernest's hands to quiver uncontrollably, how Alzheimer's left Bertha unable to recognize her own daughter, and how a stroke left Bill speechless and dragging his right leg behind him as he trudged past the nurses' station to the dining room for his afternoon coffee and cookies.
This is when I first clearly understood the brain's relationship to the body, that a blood clot in the brain causes a stroke and that since Bill's right side was partially paralyzed, the stroke had occurred in the left side of his brain. While he and Emil and Erna are all long gone, those memories from over 20 years ago are still vivid. Now the image of Bill silently smiling at Arlene in her white uniform reminds me of the degree to which my composition students are also “speechless,” sometimes because of a “stroke” inflicted by an educational system that focuses almost exclusively on the logical, linear, language-based left side of their brains while the holistic, intuitive, image-based right side is ignored. Any practicing writer knows that the best writing occurs when we use both sides of our brains.
You've probably noticed in my writing, too, over the past couple of years that I've gone from left brain to right brain and back again, often in the same article. Sometimes I'm mostly logical and analytical and use my “teacherly voice,” as my friend Destine calls it. However, at other times -- like now -- I let myself go and write whatever comes, no matter how irrelevant or crazy it might seem, hoping for connections and associations but reserving logical judgment for later. Like a jazz musician jamming and improvising, following the stream of sound, I ignore any inclination to think about what I'm doing and avoid predicting where I'll end up. It's like stepping off a high-diving board, and while plummeting toward the water, my hair lifts, I pinch my nose with my right thumb and forefinger, squeeze my eyes shut, and brace for the plunge into the water. Once I step off the board, what happens is out of my hands. It's all gravity then, just me and the air coursing around my body and the water rushing up to meet me, and all I can do is accept the fall, maybe even revel in it like a skydiver, like Emily Wiseman, who, since she was 13, wanted to jump out of an airplane but her mother always told her, “Not as long as you're on our insurance.” And Emily kept saying she wanted to skydive, year after year, and now that she's 19 and has been dreaming of falling out of the sky for the past six years, her mother finally said, “Okay, go ahead.” So she did, and now on the bulletin board outside of her dad's office on the fourth floor of Killam Library hang 16 sheets of paper that Allen printed out and assembled into a big poster of Emily in a pink jumpsuit -- her blond hair blown back, clear goggles over her eyes, arms outstretched, and a young, dark-haired guy strapped to her and riding piggyback down through the sky, thin wispy clouds above them and another layer of white puffy clouds below and down even further squares of land. Right brain thinking is Emily jumping out of the airplane; left brain thinking is her mom saying no and worrying -- a mother's duty, of course -- about her getting hurt and the effect on their insurance.
It's like the narrator in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance describing a musician who says to him when he's trying to understand jazz, “Won't you please just kindly dig it, man?” The musician simply wanted him to stop intellectualizing about jazz, to let go and just sense it and enjoy it. In short, he wanted him to use the right side of his brain since he obviously was in the habit -- like most of us -- of using the left. When we over-an alyze things, dissect them -- whether animate or inanimate -- we inevitably take much of the life out of them. We make them accessible only to the left brain, and whatever the right brain perceived, enjoyed, or reveled in is too often discounted as unimportant, unreliable, unintelligent.
Writing, however, ultimately means putting into words and language everything -- images, metaphors, and sensory details from the right brain and thoughts, ideas, and opinions from the left -- in order to verbalize them, which is, of course, the province of the brain's left side. The right side produces much of the magic of good writing by making the intuitive leaps, the unexpected associations, the seemingly illogical transformations of sensory experience that the left is incapable of and which, unfortunately, many educators reject as anti-intellectual, suspect, and even superstitious.
Evidence of the difficulty of using the right side after years of neglect is all around. Consider, for example, some of the writing my English 1301 students turned in after the first three weeks of class. Although I've seen it every semester for the past 13 years, the early drafts of descriptions that even the best students turn in still surprise me. Despite all that we do together in class -- discussing, practicing, and analyzing the importance of details, specific names, and sensory appeals -- their papers, though often competent, are dull, vague, and abstract, like these excerpts from students' early drafts, the first from Ruth:
“I look up at the walls colored in beige, decorated with artificial ornaments that make the walls not look plain. In between the windows, an artificial flowery ornament hanging on the wall takes up a small space, which made the room look even more pleasing. Three long windows on one side, two on the other and two at the back would let a warm light fill up the room making it less gloomy.”
And this second example is from Andrea:
“My attention was soon captured by the cluster of pictures and portraits on the wall. It puzzled and amazed me how time and time again I looked at these pictures with the same curiosity and interest as if I had never seen them before. I especially enjoyed seeing the wedding pictures. My grandmother's was first and then followed by Tia Mari's, mom's, and Tia Norma's. I found it interesting how the wedding dresses varied from traditional classic to fashionably modern.”
The writing in both excerpts clearly has its origins in the left brain; it's rational, passive and filled with abstract judgments like “puzzled,” “plain,” “interesting,” “pleasing,” “less gloomy,” and “traditional” and general labels like “ornaments,” “windows,” and “pictures.” It's the kind of uninspired writing that has become a habit; that students think is expected no matter what I tell or show them; and that sniffs of formulas and rubrics, unenthusiastic instruction and high-stakes, standardized testing. It's what results from years of requiring students to rely almost exclusively on the left side of the brain, the center of logic, language, and abstraction, at the expense of the right side, where intuition, imagination, and visualization reside.
Successful writers know the importance of using the right side of the brain. While handbooks and composition texts focus primarily on left-brain aspects of writing -- grammar, sentence and essay structure, vocabulary, documentation of sources, and critical thinking -- plenty of books recognize the importance of right brain skills -- developing voice, using figurative language, practice writing, freeing the subconscious, and focusing on concrete images. Some of the most famous and popular include Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind , William Stafford's Writing the Australian Crawl , Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write , Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer , and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird . All take an intuitive, right-brain approach to writing. However, many others consider both right and left brain writing skills: Strunk and White's The Elements of Style , William Zinsser's On Writing Well and Writing to Learn , Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town , and even Bill Walsh's The Elephants of Style . Unfortunately, however, these are rarely used as required texts for composition classes.
According to Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain , a vastly popular book that has helped many people learn to draw:
“[F]rom childhood onward, we have learned to see things in terms of words: we name things, and we know facts about them. The dominant left verbal hemisphere doesn't want too much information about things it perceives -- just enough to recognize and to categorize. The left brain, in this sense, learns to take a quick look and says, ‘Right, that's a chair (or an umbrella, bird, tree, dog, etc.).' Because the brain is overloaded most of the time with incoming information, [...] one of its functions is to screen out a large proportion of incoming perceptions. This is a necessary process to enable us to focus our thinking and one that works very well for us most of the time. But drawing [like writing] requires that you look at something for a long time, perceiving lots of details, registering as much information as possible -- ideally, everything .... The left hemisphere has no patience with this detailed perception, and says, in effect, “It's a chair, I tell you. That's enough to know.”
And unfortunately, as Edwards points out, “The right brain -- the dreamer, the artificer, the artist -- is lost in our school system and goes largely untaught.” As a result, students find it difficult to pay attention to details, to look closely, to see as if for the first time and for themselves, and to go beyond the general labels, like Ruth's and Andrea's “windows,” “ornaments,” and “pictures,” to the more precise names and details that recreate the particulars of their own experience. Students often become so dependent on the ideas and language of others that it takes vigorous convincing to make them understand that writing something original, interesting, and readable demands that they analyze and synthesize; that they think logically and intuitively; that they opine with generalizations and abstractions and support them with concrete details. In short, that they use both the left and the right sides of their brains.
But neglect of the right side of the brain happens too often in writing classes in our public schools, our community colleges, and our universities. I've known composition professors who, when they believe that a teaching method or approach lacks academic rigor or fails to involve critical thinking skills, which originate in the left brain, criticize it for being inappropriate for university students. A colleague once used the words “touchy, feely” to describe the use of more personal, expressive, right-brain writing and less documented, academic, left-brain writing. Another went so far as to say that “teaching writing for its own sake is what takes place in creative writing or similar courses.” The implication here is that any student capable of logical thinking should be able to communicate in writing and that only those interested in “creative” ideas and skills should acquire them in what is often perceived as an academically suspect elective that focuses on creation, not analysis and critical thinking. Even well-known composition specialist Donald Bartholomae said that personal expressive writing is “a corrupt, if extraordinarily tempting genre,” as if there was nothing of value to be learned about writing if one writes about one's own life and experiences. These are the attitudes that result in neglecting the right side in required courses, again sending the message that only half of students' brains -- the left side -- is worth educating.
My question, therefore, is this: What effect does focusing primarily on left-brain approaches to writing and teaching writing have on students and teachers?
In an effort to get some answers, I conducted an unscientific survey in which I asked 40 Laredo writing teachers -- 33 in elementary, middle, or high school -- to complete a questionnaire about their writing and teaching practices and abilities. The results say much about our students and how teachers are prepared to teach them to write. First, 45% of these teachers said that they have taken no classes “that taught [them] how to teach students to write.” This suggests that both education programs and programs for English majors perceive writing as a logical, strictly left-brain process that any reasonably intelligent graduate can analyze and teach. In addition, probably as a result of teachers' lack of preparation and/or confidence, when these writing teachers were asked, “How often do you write for an audience?” 50% answered “less than once a month” and 26% answered “never.” Similarly, 45% said that they are only “somewhat confident” or “not confident” both in their “ability to write” and in their “ability to diagnose specific weaknesses in [their] students' writing and recommend solutions for overcoming those weaknesses.” This suggests that when teachers get in the classroom, they discover first-hand that there's more to writing than logic. Most unsettling is that when asked, “How confident are you in your ability to teach students to write?” only 16% of these teachers said that they are “very confident” while 42% said that they are only “somewhat confident” or “not confident.” And I fear that, like trickle-down Reaganomics, teachers' incomplete, left-brain preparation for entering the writing classroom has not only left them unable or unwilling to write or to fully understand the act of writing, but that this also inevitably affects our students' ability to write. When asked, “How would you rate the writing ability of the majority of students who enter your classes?” 39% said their students are “weak writers [with] below average skill,” and 45% said they are “poor writers [who are] well below grade level.” When our education system fails to prepare teachers to teach writing, fails to recognize the role that both sides of our brains play in the act of writing, and perpetuates the problem by having many teachers who don't write teach writing as a left-brain activity, it shouldn't come as a surprise to any of us that a large percentage of Laredo students and students around the country have difficulty writing and even dislike writing.
Some people will argue -- using only the left side of their brains, of course -- that my observations here are unreliable, that I don't have representative samples, haven't reached verifiable conclusions, haven't even made logical connections between my ideas. There may be some truth to those accusations, but that doesn't necessarily make my assertions false. Instead, try to open your mind and your eyes as Ruth and Andrea did when encouraged to see things anew and revise their descriptions:
“I look up at the beige walls, decorated with artificial flowers that make the walls not look plain. In between the windows, an artificial ornament consisting of red flowers with green leaves around it hangs on the wall taking up a small space, which made the room look even more pleasing. Three long windows on one side, two on the other and two at the back let a warm light fill the room. Beige curtains hang on each window with a pair of green ones on each side of it.” --Ruth
“A cluster of pictures and portraits hung on the wall just like the fruit on Büelita's trees. It puzzled and amazed me how time and time again these pictures tickled my curiosity and interest causing me to look at them as if they were new. Four large wooden framed wedding pictures hung in the center of the main wall all lined up in order of occurrence. My grandmother's was first and then followed by Tía Mari's, Mom's, and Tía Norma's. The wedding dresses varied from traditional classic to fashionably modern (unfortunately for my Tía Mari ruffles were ‘in'). The display of different and contagious smiles and happy faces made me smile. Other portraits scattered throughout the wall included usual baby, graduation, prom, birthday, sport, and glamour pictures; all in all, the picture-infested walls resembled a giant photo album.” --Andrea
While probably unaware of the right-brain shift they made, both writers improved their original drafts through the addition of visual details and of figurative language, especially Andrea's “like the fruit of Büelita's trees” and “the picture-infested walls resembled a giant photo album.”
Yesterday, after I had worked on this article for over four hours, I went to Jack in the Box, ordered a sandwich, and gave the young man behind the counter a ten-dollar bill. He handed me the change, the receipt, and a large plastic cup. I filled it with ice and Coke, sat down in a booth next to a window, and waited for them to call my number. I looked around the restaurant and then at the cup; on the side next to a picture of Jack -- the large, white ping-pong ball head, the inverted cone hat, a nice business suit -- was a quote attributed to him:
“I wanted to write something funny, but I didn't want to see soda come out of your nose.” --Jack
I smiled. Not at the left-brain abstraction about “something funny” but at the right-brain concrete image of how “something funny” might affect me while drinking my soda. Even Jack understands the appeal of thinking and writing with both sides of our brains.
Works Cited
Bartholomae, David. “Writing with Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow.” CCC 46 (1995): 62-71.
Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence . Revised ed. New York: Tarcher/Perigee, 1989.
( Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University .)
