Ever wonder why, after twelve years of instruction, so few high school graduates can write well? After over a quarter century of teaching writing at the university level, Ruth Rogers diagnoses the causes of this plague of bad writing. She offers her readers simple techniques she uses to help students overcome their fears and become powerful writers. Her stories reveal how the "Heartspeak cure" can happen overnight. From the book: "The burden of 'This is the way it has always been done' can prevent us from making necessary course corrections in life's journey. This is why the inertia of tradition is so overwhelming. Every day of every semester while reading student writing, I see the need for change, the need to stop teaching the formal approach damaging students' writing." "The artificial, higher-level diction asked of students does more to turn them against writing than anything else. When students do not enjoy writing, they avoid it. Is this the result our education system wants to achieve-fear and dislike of writing?" "Since tradition asks us to write a different dialect than we speak, students may think, 'If I just write sentences different from everyday speech, they will be good sentences.' Of course, this is not true. It results in a game of 'How can I avoid writing like I talk? Let me count the ways.' And 99 out of 100 attempts are awful." "We have a place we can go in our minds, in our hearts, where we discover the path to good writing. My goal as a teacher is to help college students walk this pathway often, so they can, after our time together, find it by themselves."
About the Author: Ruth Rogers lives on a family heritage site in Kentucky, not far from Mammoth Cave National Park. Ruth enrolled at Western Kentucky University and earned her undergraduate and master's degrees before going on to earn doctoral hours at Middle Tennessee State University. After many years of teaching writing at the university level and nearing retirement, Ruth decided to share her unique approach to teaching writing in Teaching Heartspeak: "This New Breed of Writing." The book is a blend of insights for writing and teaching "from the heart," with success stories of students whose writing morphed from "stinky" to powerful when they received "the Heartspeak cure.