by Sam Bennett

Above all, what does a student need from their writing teacher? What should be the centerpiece of writing pedagogy? The answer might seem obvious: to become a good writer, the student needs to appreciate the difference between good and bad writing. This way, they will have a clear goal at which to aim. So what the teacher should try to do is supply the student with a strong sense of what good writing looks like. As a natural supplement, there should be coaching and practice, with recommended strategies for creating a piece of work that has all the typical qualities of good writing, such as clarity, coherence, and so forth. 

While this idea of writing pedagogy is plausible, it puts the cart before the horse. It focuses on the finished product, when it should focus on the origin and wellspring of good writing. In my opinion, this origin is wonder, and I think it should be the focus of writing pedagogy. 

We often use “wonder” casually for reflecting on something we don’t know: “I wonder when the game will begin.” But there’s another meaning of wonder, which brings it closer to astonishment and awe — yet not in the sense of a dazzling emotional experience, such as a “wondrous” fireworks show. Instead, there is what Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) meant by wonder. He noticed how sometimes your mind confronts something it can’t quite place or grasp. Normally, we ignore such things and move on. Yet sometimes we pause over what we cannot quite understand, because it intrigues us. To experience this aura of intrigue around what defies our grasp is wonder. 

Based on this description of wonder, setting it up as the center of writing pedagogy seems quite naive and likely to end poorly. For wonder is an intimate, inner experience. Therefore, any teacher that tries to directly provoke wonder within us violates a sacred boundary that naturally separates each of us. While this is certainly true, it doesn’t mean that wonder should be cast aside. Instead, we need to modify its position: rather than directly provoking wonder, our goal should be taking the student to its threshold. This respects the innerness of the inner life of a student. However, what does it mean to take a student to the threshold of wonder? In other words, how does wonder typically arise? 

Rather than directly provoking wonder, our goal should be taking the student to its threshold.

If there is any fact that has reliably provoked wonder, it’s the existence of the universe. When we analyze this example, we see that it is a threshold into wonder because it is paradoxical. 

What a paradox does is cause your thought to be led in two opposing directions simultaneously. Regarding the universe, on the one hand, it’s natural to think it must’ve begun at some point. Since everything we know (trees, people, towns, etc.) has a certain life-span, the universe as a whole should have a lifespan. But if the universe has a life-span, it came into being at some point. Yet, what caused the transition from no-universe to now-we-have-a-universe? The available resources amounted to exactly nothing. But from nothing comes nothing, so we think the universe must not have begun at all. 

The universe provokes our wonder, because natural reasoning leads us in one direction and its exact opposite: that it came into being and that it did not come into being. This experience is the core of paradox. When the topic of the paradox is so grand (the universe), we are left flabbergasted, yet also intrigued, as if we were personally invited to solve not a child’s riddle, but something deep and solemn. 

Most teachers know the odd experience of finding a paper enjoyable even though it is in many respects a disaster (grammatically, formatting-wise, factually incorrect, etc.). How could this be? Often it is because the student recognized the power of two opposite answers to some question, yet grittily refused to throw up her hands. The complementary phenomenon is finding an admittedly learned and polished work that is tedious and conceited. Almost always, it is because it knows only “one side of town,” so to speak. 

The point is not that good writing leaves everything unresolved. Instead, the point is that powerful writing bespeaks a mind that has gone back and forth, endured the power of opposing vantage points. If it found a way to resolving the deadlock, so much the better for the advancement of knowledge. 

Powerful writing bespeaks a mind that has gone back and forth, endured the power of opposing vantage points. If it found a way to resolving the deadlock, so much the better for the advancement of knowledge

Paradox may seem restricted to philosophy and mathematics, but my hypothesis is that all good writing originates from paradox. Madame Bovary lives on our inner conflict, as we experience her at once innocent and guilty, which is a formula that applies to innumerable works, from Antigone to Paradise Lost. In science, Darwin’s work contends with the paradox of intelligence arising from something unintelligent (random natural processes directed by no consciousness). And the most widely read book of all time has a paradox at its center, a man who is God. 

I would also submit that the traits associated with good writing are symptoms of the mind as it grapples with what is paradoxical: focus and coherency come from the writer’s mind being on task (to dissolve the paradox); clarity derives from the need to genuinely resolve the deadlock, such that obscurity won’t cut it; the writing will even tend toward conformity with linguistic conventions, since one naturally desires to be understood by others, so that they might help you resolve the issue. But most importantly, dynamic conflict, which makes sports so thrilling, is at work in the paradox’s natural back and forth — “it must be this, yet it can’t be!” 

Familiarizing students with good writing, such that they have a clear model to imitate seems like an excellent approach to writing pedagogy, especially if students are given ample opportunity to practice. But that approach erroneously focuses on the finished product, rather the source of good writing. Above all, what a writer in training needs is an introduction to paradoxes, since they provoke wonder and invite us to think and re-think, write and re-write.