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How can you equip your student(s) to become strong, clear, and compelling writers? What tools do students need to succeed? How do you help reluctant writers grow? Andrew Pudewa, the beloved founder of the Institute for Excellence in Writing, offers practical tips and insight in today’s episode of Veritas Vox!

Want to level up your student’s writing abilities? We have professional teachers that will guide your student through Andrew’s IEW curriculum in our live online classes. Help your student develop a love of writing today!

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Marlin Detweiler:

Hello again, this is Marlin Detweiler with Veritas Press on our podcast, Veritas the Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today, we are honored to have as our guest Andrew Pudewa, what many of you have probably heard him speak because he speaks a lot in lots of places.

I understand he may have slowed down a bit in recent years, as those of us that are now in our sixties have been known to do. But Andrew, many years ago, founded the Institute for Excellence in Writing. Before we jump into that, though, Andrew, give us a little bit of who you are as a person, what your family, your interests outside of your work, and that sort of thing.

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah, sure. I have been blessed with seven children, all grown now. The youngest is 22 and has a two-year-old if my numbers are correct. Up to 15 grandchildren, which is by far the best, if not the only good thing about getting old.

Marlin Detweiler:

I am amazed, and I am jealous.

Andrew Pudewa:

Well, you can catch up. You never know. But it is. It is a delight. My background is in music education. I actually lived and studied with Dr. Suzuki of the Suzuki Method in Japan for three years and then worked in the field of child brain development for three or four years and then kind of stumbled into this business of homeschooling.

And then, I started the Institute for Excellence in Writing in 1995. When did you start Veritas Press? It was right around there, wasn't it?

Marlin Detweiler:

Veritas was technically started in September of ‘96.

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

So the roots have about the same depth.

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah, we're birthday buddies there. And so in ‘99, it had grown big enough running around, teaching seminars, selling some little videos. We created this spelling program that I was actually doing better with the writing business stuff than teaching music. So it was at that time we moved from Moscow, Idaho, to California. I went full-time into IEW, and it's just been great since then.

I've had the pleasure of speaking to many, many dozens of thousands of homeschool parents, both live and virtually. And, of course, seeing the classical education movement grow, both in schools, private schools, public schools, Catholic schools, charter schools, and in the homeschool world, has been just such a fantastic thing to have been able to be part of.

Marlin Detweiler:

IEW is a unique program. Can you give us a little sense of how it came about, what motivated you to create it or inspired you to create it and what gave it shape?

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah. I was working for this small school in Montana, and there was a Canadian woman who was also working for the school, and she kind of convinced us all that we needed to go to northern Alberta and take a ten-day teacher training course called the Blended Sounds Sight Program of Learning. She was so effective at this that the whole faculty of the small school, which is like a dozen people, you know, is a small school.

We all went up there for a couple of weeks and took the course. And that's where I met Dr. James B. Webster, who became kind of my mentor. He was a professor of African history at Dalhousie University. Fascinating guy! Lived and worked in Africa for a couple of decades, and he had worked over many, many years. This system of teaching English composition with structure and style.

And so I learned it that first year. This is 1990 when I first went up there; he came back, taught a year at that school. The results were fantastic. Surprised me, surprised the parents, and surprised the kids themselves on how much improvement in writing And then, the next year, I moved to a different spot, but I kept tutoring and writing on the side.

I went back the next summer to help out at that Canadian course, the Blended Sounds Type Program of Learning. And it just I think I went up there a total of eight times between 1990 and 2004. And so I kind of became part of their team. And then as I started to, you know, travel and teach the structure and style method, what caught me originally to answer your question as I was there learning about this idea of using models to teach with so that you could have imitation and checklists so people could know exactly what to do.

And this kind of, you know, do everything you can do and add one more thing when that becomes easy and this kind of embedded mastery approach to teaching and learning. And I just thought this is a Suzuki method for teaching English composition. It fit just so perfectly in with what I had understood to be the most effective way to teach and learn things.

Marlin Detweiler:

So the modeling is the key element that you're working with in IEW as it progresses in a student's life.

Andrew Pudewa:

Yes, we begin with the idea of using source texts, as you know, and these source texts then give the student the content for being able to practice their writing skills. So for many decades in this country, we've treated the teaching of writing kind of like a creative art. And this idea of just throw paper at kids and cheerlead them into expressing themselves, and somehow they'll gain ability. And occasionally, that happens. But most of the time, it creates a lot of frustration.

I make the comparison if I were to teach music the way we've taught writing in this country for five decades can be like, “Come on over to my place, sit down at the piano, I'll teach you the names of the notes and how to push the keys, but you got to kind of make everything up as you go. Just kind of fool around at the piano for half an hour a day for the next decade, and you'll learn something.”

Marlin Detweiler:

There's a lot of silliness in our educational process, and it's one of the appeals of classical Christian education. Not that writing is uniquely classical or that a method of writing is uniquely classical, but the idea that in classical Christian education, we have simply not taken what somebody says is this is how we currently do it. We've challenged the current standard and said and thought about it, and said, “Is this the best way to do it?”

Does it work? And I'm so glad to hear that's exactly what's going on there. And it doesn't surprise me at all because I've been interacting with you for most of Veritas Press' life for more than 25 years. My questions as I go through my list of questions here with you may overlap a bit, but what are some of the keys to great writing beyond modeling? Then what do you see happening as students develop?

Andrew Pudewa:

Well, you know, it's kind of a technical approach. And so we have in addition of models, we have these checklists that are going to stretch the student to try things that they would not normally do. There's a book once it was titled If You Can Talk, You Can Write. And I really didn't like this book because it was basically saying, just write like you talk. And I thought I should write an opposite book. Don't Write Like You Talk. You know, there's a formality, there's a tradition. There’s the great schools of grammar and logic and rhetoric that build in this rich, rich background of experience and information and confidence and knowledge that coalesce and come together. Yeah, there are some naturally talented people who can just start writing, and it flows, and they become, you know, this natural writer, and the parents and teachers love it, and maybe they grow up and write books.

But for most kids, there is a pathway that needs to be followed to develop increasingly skilled expression of language on paper, I guess we'd say on a screen now, but it goes way back. We're not at IEW doing anything particularly new. You can read in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography about how he wanted to improve his writing, so he took The Spectator Magazine and, by making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, was able to practice reconstructing those ideas.

You could even go back– I was teaching a seminar to a school in Dallas one time, and one of the teachers who actually had his Ph.D. in philosophy and a master's in classics or something, he came up to me and said, “You know, this is very similar to the pro gymnast moda. Do you know about that?” And I said, “Well, I know a little bit. Tell me more!” And so while we don't use like some programs to kind of heavy use of explicitly classic terminology, such as exortium and refutation and recapitulation and all that. We do the same thing in a way that's kind of been at the core of good communication from Quintilian through the Middle Ages time and you look at, you know, maybe Thomas Aquinas to some degree. And then you get into the more modern era where writing was considered a very, very, very important thing to do well.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, to underscore what you said, whether it's writing, art, music, really, anything creative, if you think of it as creative in the beginning, you will have squelched their creativity in the end. They need the tools in order to learn how to create. Taking the tools idea literally: teaching someone how to use a hammer, a drill, a saw, can open up enormous creativity. But the idea of saying, oh, go build me something and give them a bunch of boards and have the tools sitting on the side, not having trained them how to use them, is, depending on the age of the child, a pretty dangerous activity.

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah. And I think Dorothy Sayers talks about that makes that same comparison in her seminal essay, The Lost Tools of Learning. And so, you know, we're working in that zone to say, okay, how do we collect, organize, and present ideas using these tools in a way that also allows for greater creativity down the line?

And another analogy would be Legos. If you just, you know, give people a blob of clay and say, here, make something out of it. Most people are pretty frustrated by that. They're just like, “It's ugly. I don't like it. It doesn't look like what I was trying to make.” But if you give kids a, you know, a box of Legos and a plan. Now, here's the interesting thing. You give them a little plan. You've got grandkids. So you're in the Lego world.

Marlin Detweiler:

I am sitting right now six miles from Legoland and have been there only once. But my wife with grandkids has been there probably five or six times this year. I understand Legos.

Andrew Pudewa:

But that idea of here's some pieces, here's a plan, put them together according to the plan, make your little Star Wars spaceship or whatever. And there's a satisfaction in that. But then what you notice with kids playing with Legos is they say, Well, okay, I know how to do that now. I want to play with it. So an experiment, instead of putting that thing there, I'll put it here, and maybe it'll look even cooler.

And so it, it becomes kind of the seed of creativity where you have not the blob of clay, but the opportunity for the combination and permutation of ideas that you are able to work with confidently. And I think for a lot of kids, that confidence is just a huge, huge thing.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, great segway there. As you and I have dealt with hundreds of thousands of children over a couple of decades, we've seen all types, and there are kids that I would categorize as reluctant writers. What is your advice to people dealing with students who simply say, I don't like to write, I don't want to write? How do you help parents and teachers overcome such objections from the student?

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah, that's such a good question. And many parents and teachers are a little confused because kids are so different. Some of them just take to it, and they just flow and there's no problem. And others, it's, “I hate this,” and they'll do anything to get out of it. So I think the best thing to do is try to understand the complexity of the process.

In order to write something, the first thing that has to exist is an idea. If there's no idea and nobody's going to write anything, that idea can pre-exist outside the mind. It can exist inside the mind in terms of, say, memory or imagination. And that idea has to be spoken into existence. So you have to first find an idea, then you kind of have to speak it into existence because if you don't hear the words connected with that idea, you can't really ever write them down.

And a lot of ideas for children are very sensory. They're ephemeral. If I say write about your trip that you took, those memories don't necessarily exist in words. A lot of them exist in images and sounds and tastes and feelings. So kids need the vocabulary to translate that into words that accurately or, to some degree, represent those.

So there's a vocabulary element, and then they have to hold the idea that's been spoken into existence in their memory long enough to then go and figure out how to write the first word, whether that's making letters or spelling the word. Then they have to go visit the idea, get the next word, get that on paper, get the next one, get that on paper and hold the whole thing long enough to get the whole thing on paper.

And if there's a breakdown in that process, you've got to go start all over again, find the idea, speak it into existence. Hear what you heard yourself say to yourself. Remember what you heard yourself say to yourself and go back to where you were. So it's really an insanely complex idea. In fact, I often say the fact that human beings write should be proof of the existence of God because there's just no way this could have like evolved, you know?

So the advice for parents who have kids that dislike it is to break it into the smallest possible steps, so they don't get overwhelmed with the complexity and magnitude of the process itself. So and I think this is typical of many things we do in classical education. We start with these small pieces and master those and then start putting them together and adding complexity as mastery allows for.

Marlin Detweiler:

Do you see a connection of any type between students who enjoy reading and students who are effective at writing? Are good readers good writers?

Andrew Pudewa:

Yes, but not always. I think there would be a strong overlap if you were looking at a set Venn diagram or something. But I do meet kids who read a lot and don't really like writing. One thing, in that case, is they just their brains are so fast. I'm sure you've met kids who just think so fast, and they don't necessarily know how to slow down what they're thinking in order to get into that process of writing.

Obviously, a huge factor is vocabulary. Kids who read well will very often know more words. Just because of exposure. And the more words you know, the more accurately, the more fully, the more satisfyingly- if that's a word, you can express ideas. But I've kind of studied this, Marlin, and I would say a bigger predictor of writing skills in older kids or adults isn't necessarily having read a lot, but having been read to a lot in the younger years.

So children who get a lot of language in through their ears, by parents reading out loud, teachers reading in class audiobooks they will build that more complex syntax. They will have kind of an inherent grammar that allows a more complex form of expression, both verbal and written. So oftentimes, a reluctant writer will also be a reluctant reader, and, you know, my basic advice is to keep working on the phonics, keep encouraging, but never stop reading out loud to that child in huge quantity.

Marlin Detweiler:

I have a great story there. Our oldest granddaughter was learning to read, but she would not admit it to anyone for fear that they would stop reading to her. The only person that she would willingly tell that she could read was Laurie, her ‘Mimi,’ my wife. And she said, “Maybe I can read, but I don't want to tell people I can because I don't want people to stop reading.”

She was very clear about it and was pretty funny. And I can tell you, having raised four boys, one of the things I would do differently is I would read to them more given the opportunity because I think the benefit that you just described and a number of others are really hard to overvalue in their impact, in the influence and the upbringing that our children get.

Speaking of our children and the world we live in, technology has changed things. Text messaging is abbreviations and sentence fragments. Communication and email is done in such a way that people make fun of people like me who try to use full sentences and proper punctuation. It's like, you don't need to do that, you shouldn't do that. And I am not going to break the habit.

It's not because I can't; it's because I won't. But I'm curious what your thoughts are on how the last, let's call it 20 years of development of technological means of communication have impacted the quality of writing.

Andrew Pudewa:

That's a complex subject. Certainly, we are seeing a lot of changes going. And it's almost as though we moved from a verbal, primarily a verbal interaction between most people into now more of a text-based interaction in so many cases, like my kids basically don't make phone calls because it's kind of rude, right?

So you would always text someone before you would call them. And if you could avoid calling them, you would just text. And then the flip side of that is they always say, “Dad, it's really a pain to text you because we have to like capitalize our letters and put periods in commas or else you'll get mad.” And I'm like, “I'm not getting mad!” But I guess, the summary of what has happened, I believe, is we are seeing the simplification of language where people are communicating in shorter bursts, shorter sentences. It's become efficient but not artistic. So in a way, the whole idea of writing a letter that had both substance and style and you think back to some of the great letters that we might read from, Founding Father's era or even people like Churchill or, some of the letters of soldiers back in the WW1 ear, they were eloquent.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, that leads to my last question a little bit. So I'm going to go to that question, and then we'll come back to one or two others. But in some public speaking that I've done, I've occasionally read letters from foot soldiers in the war between the states. So time frame was 1860s, 150,160, 170 years ago, and they are written so well compared to the typical student and the typical young adults' abilities today. What's changed, and what can we do about it?

Andrew Pudewa:

Wow, and it's so true because even I read those and think, man, I don't think I could write that beautifully, you know. And these were men with maybe eighth-grade education. It wasn't like they went to college. It was everyone could do. So I think there's a few reasons.

Number one is the schools back then, we're really still using, to a great degree, the classical approach. They were teaching grammar. In fact, a long time ago, nobody said elementary school. They would always say grammar school. Right. And so they learn grammar, not just English grammar, but they learned Latin and Greek bits. So their vocabulary was better, and their expectations were much higher.

And then, of course, you think about the culture. If there's no television, there's no movies. Books are somewhat expensive and in some cases, even rare. There's no real form of entertainment other than families sitting in one room, from grandma down to the baby on the floor. Everybody, what are they doing? They're reading the Bible. They're reading the great classics of the day and the ancient classics. Homer… these things that people had revered, and they're talking about them in sophisticated ways.

So the whole idea of engaging with fairly complex language was normal for everyone back in that time period. And of course, the literacy rate in the mid-1800s in the United States, among the white population, was about the highest literacy rate ever in the history of the whole world. And so there just know everyone was striving up, nobody was being dumbed down.

The classical tradition was strong. The work ethic, and the teaching ethic was high standards. And then that was, I think, the source of this incredible richness of thought. And then people could debate meaningfully really complex things. And I always think about the Lincoln-Douglas debates. They'd go on for hours and hours and hours, go take a break, come back and go on for more hours and hours, getting really deep. And you compare that with, say, you know, a presidential or vice presidential televised debate of today.

Marlin Detweiler:

Which is about soundbites.

Andrew Pudewa:

It's just they're not even the same! You can't you shouldn't even use the same word to describe them. And I guess my whole thought on this is summed up in the sentence from one of my good friends, also in classical education, he said, “If you can't read a complex sentence, you cannot think a complex thought. If you cannot think a complex thought, please don't vote.”

I mean something to consider.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, there is a serious consideration needed for that sort of thing. We have an interesting place. We live in interesting times, and it's not all good.

And that's why we're interested in classical education because we want to see things change. We do want to pull up the standard. And that kind of leaves my last category here for this conversation.

It's been described we have commonly described the beginnings of a modeling system of your system, IEW, a little bit like putting training wheels on a young student’s bicycle. I can't for the life of me figure out, and I've done it with my kids, and now I'm doing it with my grandkids. I haven't figured out how a bike rider picks up the difference between being balanced themselves and the training wheels. But I know how to do it. I kind of give them a push. I stay with them, and they figure it out.

So it's pretty hard for me, you know, I'm not able to– I was almost tempted to say I'm not a biologist, but I won't say that I am not able to describe the physics of how a body picks up on balance and that difference. But there's something going on that takes the training wheels off, and the student all of a sudden takes off in an enjoyable way of writing without training wheels. Do you have a sense of how that happens? And ultimately, how do we develop writers like the 19th-century soldier? We talked about our soldiers.

One of the things I enjoyed reading about the lost tools of learning that Dorothy Sayers, you mentioned it earlier, is how eloquently she makes points. I see that in so few writers today, and I desperately want to see I want to be part of helping to create thousands of people that write that way. Do you have some key ideas that caused that to happen?

Andrew Pudewa:

Well, one of the strengths of Sayers and, you know, her whole era, her whole. They had the ability to use just the right word in just the right way. And if we look at the active vocabulary of Americans, depending on which analysis, which study, it appears to have shrunk to less than half of what it was even 50 years ago.

Marlin Detweiler:

Wow.

Andrew Pudewa:

We are just in general, using fewer words. If we were to compare it with 100 years ago, I don't know what the percentage would be, but you pick up something that's written, and you start reading. Even I will say, “Wow! That's a word I have not heard for a long time.” And it's usually just the right word.

So I've often said to kids and parents, the more words you have, the more thought that you can think. Studying a foreign language is very helpful to realize this because in most languages, there's words that carry a nuance, a subtlety, an impact, and it just doesn't translate easily or perfectly into another language. And this is one reason I think every student should study a foreign language for way more than just two years.

I mean, what do you get out of two years of Spanish in high school, the ability to say, “Hola, amigo.” But if you study six, seven, eight years of Latin or French or something, it will impact your ability to learn new English words and grammar.

Marlin Detweiler:

Latin itself with so many root words coming from Latin and in English, this is an enormous tool of leverage for developing vocabulary. Obviously, there are a lot of other reasons for learning Latin, but very important.

Andrew Pudewa:

And they all studied that all the great writers. They had that incredible ability to give complex, complete thoughts with precision and an economy of words. And so part of what I view our work in classical education in IEW is where our job is to build the marble.

So we're working with word lists and checklists and different grammatical constructions and giving the kids these tasks to do that are going to force them to use words that they wouldn't normally use, force them to use syntax that they wouldn't normally use. And yeah, it can be awkward in the beginning. It's like, you know, playing an instrument, you learn a new thing on an instrument. There is an awkward period of time. But the awkwardness. That doesn't mean it isn't worth learning. It just means you have to practice until it's less awkward.

And my view is I'm building the marble, the marble of vocabulary, a broader syntax of a deeper appreciation for what communication and of language and grammar. It's so deep in its meaning to us as human beings.

I want kids to fall in love with language. I don't really care what an 11-year-old does in terms of how good it is compared to other 11-year-olds, or does it make sense or is it awkward? I don't really care about that because that child is going to grow up and become an adult.

If that child has this large amount of linguistic marble, then someone else can help carve that away and make them into a journalist or a technical writer or a historian, or a children's book author. So that's kind of what I view my work–is let's give them as much raw material as possible. Get them to fall in love with writing and poetry and story and telling stories and retelling information. And then wherever they go after that, they'll have more to work with.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, that is, that is so good. What a great place to end this interview. Thank you so much, Andrew, for joining us today. I wish you well. We enjoy working with you and look forward to continuing that.

Andrew Pudewa:

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. And you keep up your great work there at Veritas Vox, is it Veritas?

Marlin Detweiler:

Vox.

Andrew Pudewa:

I love it.

Marlin Detweiler:

Education. Yep. Thanks. Bye bye.

Andrew Pudewa:

Bye.