In today's schools many things are over-designed. There are formats for all kind of written works - notes, tests, letters, comprehension etc. Children have to follow these formats else they may lose marks.
No doubt this makes it easy for teachers to detect outliers and non-conformists. And indeed it is easy to catch sloppy children by strictly adhering to various formats and rules. However, this has far-reaching, unintended consequence.
Its become harder for a child to develop a sense of neatness in his or her work. There is a difference between a 'format' and a 'form'. Children quickly learn to mimic the format without developing internal sense of form and proportion. An elegant written work has a form - spacing, margins, tabs for paragraphs and justifications.
Sometimes, when kids ask me how they should write some text or solve a maths sum, I tell them to do it in a way that looks neat - no rules. And hope that they will learn to differentiate between neat work and sloppy work.
While it is easy to learn the format, it takes time and an eye to learn the form. Children wouldn't learn elegance of written work if we don't give space and time to explore.
A well-formatted written work has a template-driven syntactic structure. Would you refer to it as well-formed if that template is self-evolved and adaptive? To me, in either case the focus is on the syntactic structure than semantic structure that has to do with the content of the written work. Where does such structured-writing fall in the space, or am I just stretching the scope of this post beyond its original intention?
ReplyDeleteI think you have a point. That its often not easy to differentiate between form and format. One is not independent of other.
ReplyDeleteHowever, children often end up learning format without building internal sense of the form. So as one learns the formats one should also extract generic properties from it (as to what looks neat to an eye). Too many children end-up conforming to format without developing that internal sense.
I see what you mean.
ReplyDelete