A Writer's Instinct

Expert writers have developed what we might call a "writer's instinct." Of course, instincts are hard-wired like hunger, thirst, fear, sex, you know. These instincts are beyond our conscious control. But we have other kinds of innate instincts not so clear cut—emotional instincts like grief or playfulness, social instincts like territoriality and navigation. Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky suggest that humans are born with an innate capacity for language, often referred to as the "language instinct" after the title of Pinker’s (1994) book.

This idea is complex. Specific languages are learned through cultural participation, but the ability and drive to acquire language are biologically determined by the human brain. Evidence includes universal developmental stages in language acquisition, the existence of a critical period for learning language, and specialized brain regions like Broca's and Wernicke's areas dedicated to linguistic processing. In contrast, for example, ground squirrels chirp when high-caliber, airborne predators are in the vicinity and whistle when low-threat terrestrial predators are close by. Freeman et al. (2020) studied these critters and found the following: “We conclude that reception of alarm calls, implying differential predation risk, results in call‐specific neural activation patterns.” In other words, these squirrels were not taught to head for the hills when they heard a chirp. They knew instinctively. They came from the factory with the device already installed.

The key point is that instinctive behavior in animals isn’t learned and need not be directly taught. Humans, on the other hand, can develop instinct-like responses grounded in experiential learning. In the case of human writing, writers are not born with a biological mandate. They learn to write from experiences and instruction within social and cultural space. The metaphor of "instinct" in any area of professional expertise from doctors to plumbers expresses how extensive training and experience become internalized into automatic responses like, say, a knee-jerk reaction to a telling detail.

A police detective's instinct comes from examining crime scenes as the responsible party, the person where the buck stops, and interviewing thousands of suspects. When something "feels off" about a witness statement or crime scene detail, the detective isn't consciously running through a learned checklist of similar cases or checking in with headquarters for the latest research; they're using emotional associations—something “feels off.” Maybe it's how the witness won't make eye contact but keeps glancing at that closet door. Or how the victim's wedding photos are all face-down, but the place wasn't ransacked. Their brain has logged thousands of these tiny tells about eye contact, photos in the house, and closet doors, tells that kick up a pit in their stomach well before they can say why.

Here’s the question: What are the features of traditional writing instruction that support or inhibit the development of a writer’s instincts through guided experience? Do we know that teaching high school students to “close read” works of literature and then write prompted essays keyed to preexisting rubrics leads to the development of good writing instincts? Why do we in the United States produce so many people who hate to write? Many among us would rather dig a ditch than write a paper. I haven’t been back to Illinois for a while, but as near as I can tell, nothing has changed where I grew up.

This is a serious ask. What your thoughts on this matter? Is it just me? Am I simply wrong? Are things going along swimmingly in writing instruction and I just don’t know? Am I looking in the wrong places for evidence? Sadly, we have no federal Department of Education taking a thoughtful, deep look into writing with the validity of mixed-methods research—we’ve never had coherent, principled, well-resourced national governmental leadership. President Obama missed the opportunity to lift up Linda Darling-Hammond to Secretary of Education in 2008. Instead, he picked Arne Duncan, and public schools set out on a race to the top.

What are you seeing from your perspective? Are we creating adults who can and do use writing in their lives in significant ways to think, to learn, and to communicate complex ideas? I understand the anger about AI’s showing up to change the game mid-year in 2022. I understand the dominance of “close reading” and “evidence-based writing” from literature. But I also know that the National Writing Project has a long history of contributing to teacher development in writing pedagogy.

Based on my personal experiences as a writing teacher across several decades, I don’t see that school writing instruction beyond NCLB is likely to have produced a majority of adults with the instincts of a writer—frankly, an instinct that, had we produced a nation of writers with instincts in the 1990s when we were gearing up in California to really teach writing, could have muted the impact of the stark ignorance that has swept “common sense” into the White House.

We need uncommon sense, the kind of sense really good writers make—even if we disagree. How do we get there from here?

Please. Take a few moments and comment on this question—don’t be shy. Is the Common Core paradigm of reading and writing instruction producing a nation of writers or even critical thinkers, in your view? What do you point to for evidence one way or the other?

Would it make any difference if our fellow citizens didn’t hate writing as much as they apparently do?