Minds Made for Stories

One of the essential books for English teachers is Thomas Newkirk's The Art of Slow Reading, and I can also recommend Embarrassment: And the Emotional Underlife of Learning. Now we hear of a new book coming in April, Writing Unbound: How Fiction Transforms Student Writers, and so here’s an updated 2017 post from SCC English.

Another excellent read is Newkirk’s 2014 book Minds Made for Stories: how we really read informational and persuasive texts. His central idea is that all good writing has narrative at its core, and that narrative is not a discrete 'genre' (despite the crude divisions of our English Leaving Certificate course). As he states, ‘all writing is narrated’. On this, I strongly recommend this piece by Professor Daniel Willingham on ‘The Privileged Status of Story’:

Research from the last 30 years shows that stories are indeed special. Stories are easy to comprehend and easy to remember, and that's true not just because people pay close attention to stories; there is something inherent in the story format that makes them easy to understand and remember. Teachers can consider using the basic elements of story structure to organise lessons and introduce complicated material, even if they don't plan to tell a story in class.

Newkirk starts 'Our theories are really disguised autobiographies, often rooted in childhood. That is the case with this book', and there are plenty of good stories and interesting references to back up his own theory. His writing, also, is blessedly free of educational jargon.

We need stories, not simply for aesthetic pleasure, but to reassure ourselves that we live in a comprehensible world.

and

Narrative is not a type of writing. Or not merely a type of writing. It has deeper roots than that. It is a property of mind, an innate and indispensable form of understanding, as instinctive as our fear of falling, as our need for human company.

There's lots more to explore. English teachers should do so.