Prelearning

The Why We Write What We Already Know Page: You know more than you know you know, ya know?

The exercises you do in this program involve a lot of writing. There are

lots of reasons why I did the program this way, but there is one giant

reason: it works! Writing about something you need to learn is generally

the best way by far to learn it.

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The writing you do to learn these writing skills is not haphazard. To get

the most out of the act of writing you need to follow a plan.

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The first step in this plan is to write about the topic before you do any

investigating. I get nervous introducing this idea to students, I can hear

the high pitched groan of, "If I knew enough to write about it, I

wouldn't need to learn it!" Mistake. What you are doing by writing

about a topic before studying it is bringing a life time of experience to the

topic. You are opening yourself to the new ideas by getting your mind

set up with places to hang the new ideas.

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This mental setup happens if you already know a lot about the topic,

and it even happens if you know nothing about the topic. What you do

by this "pre-learning" writing is establish for yourself some awareness of

your questions about the topic. It's sort of like opening the right file

drawer in your mind to store what you are about to learn.

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Some educators refer to this as "bringing your schema" to the topic.

"Schema" means what you have already experienced in life, especially

those experiences that relate to your topic.

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You don't need to call it "schema", but you do need to do the writing. If

you know, or feel you know absolutely nothing: what does the name of

the topic make you think about? What feelings do you have when asked

to do the writing? When did you ever come across the topic before? Does

doing the exercise remind you of any other writings you have done?

Times of failure and of success? It is also helpful to begin the writing

with something like, "I don't have any idea what this topic is about, but

since I have to write something, I'm going to write about a movie I saw

last night. . ."

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If you will do this, when you go to read about your topic, what you read

will usually be remembered and understood more. Often, too, when you

begin to write about a topic that feels knew to you, you will begin to

remember things about the topic you have previously experienced.

Writing does that, writing stirs up memories.

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