As always, the metaphors write themselves.
I was very much interested in this presentation on writing, reproduced today at Nancy Kelly's Sage Parnassus blog. The presentation, delivered in 1911 at an Ambleside Conference, begins with a mention of the famous frescoes in the Spanish chapel of the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Novello in Florence, which depict first the Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and immediately juxtaposed to that visual narrative, what it called The Great Recognition: Thomas Aquinas enthroned, the Book of Wisdom in his hand, above figures representing the seven branches of learning, or liberal arts. As the presenter notes, rhetoric, or composition, is one of those liberal arts – one of the branches of learning inspired by the Holy Spirit.
You'll want to read the whole thing, but I was interested in the emphasis on moving from narration (though the student never stops narrating) to various strategies for encouraging organization and prioritization of material in an essay.
I have had students narrate each paragraph of a reading in one sentence, for example. I've also taught them to make columns on a piece of paper, one for each large idea in an essay they're contemplating (or have drafted once already), and to sort notes and bits that they've already written according to which idea they're connected to, jettisoning anything that doesn't fit. For a five-paragraph essay, for example, you'd make three columns, one for each major point. Usually I teach this as a revision exercise: you've more or less free-written one draft, so that you have material to work with, OR you're mining written narrations in order to write an essay. Either way, in my view, you don't start with nothing. You're taking writing you've done and imposing some order on it.
As a poet who has never asked my own children to do any "creative writing" as part of school, I was also gratified to learn that this presenter considers exercises in blank verse to be of no material value in the classroom.
A passage I particularly want to highlight:
I do not think it enough, in most cases, to put good literature into the children’s hands, and then leave them to choose their own style, but I think they should be helped to observe and to discriminate. For this purpose I should make a wide use of extracts as illustrating different points of style, not of course in the literature lesson, but in teaching composition. The books set for the term do not always afford enough variety. I do not think I should ask a child to imitate a particular style, but I should like him to be so far steeped in the works of as many good writers as possible, that he would be able to recognize the author in an extract he had never heard before, just as he should know an unnamed picture of Raphael, Titian, or Botticelli from his knowledge of the painters’ characteristics.
Here I like the emphasis on making the student aware of what contributes to a given writer's style, which really boils down to choosing passages for rhetorical analysis. In this way, the student has a vocabulary about writing at his own disposal, which increases the scope of choices he has in his own writing.
Here, too, I think that I – and the Mater Amabilis curriculum I largely follow – perhaps have provided more variety in the readings I offer in a term. I've certainly been conscious of choosing both older and more contemporary books and, to the greatest extent possible, a "wide and varied feast" of rhetorical styles and voices. Still, some opportunity to examine rhetoric as rhetoric is important and empowering for developing writers.
Anyway, you will want to read the whole essay.