by Russell Frank
“You’ve had a profound influence on my son. I can’t tell you how grateful I am,” the father of a gifted eighth grader in my class told me. The mother of another student of mine, this one with learning disabilities also reported “My son can’t wait to get started on your assignments. I’ve never seen him so excited to write! What are you doing in your class?”
These two parent comments summarize Rebekah Caplan’s profound, immediate influence on my teaching and on my students. I made a difference in their lives, because Rebekah made a difference in mine starting in 1980 when she showed me her approach to teaching writing, “Showing, Not Telling” detailed in her book, Writers in Training (1984).
I met Rebekah in 1980 near the end of my third year of teaching. My principal had tasked me with the writing component of our school plan, but, up to that time, I’d never been exposed to effective teaching of writing especially to middle schoolers. I was a blank slate, so he sent me to the conference to start remedying that. Rebekah, at the time, was a high school teacher/consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project, and her presentation at the conference. “Showing, Not Telling” brimmed with enthusiasm and expertise. As a former athlete, I could relate to its “training” metaphor, and “Showing not Telling” kindled a spark of excitement. I think I could do this! It makes so much sense!
I was very fortunate to be selected a few months later for the 1980 UCIWP Summer Institute. The number of great presenters and ideas overwhelmed, and when Rebekah was introduced, I got a second chance to experience “Showing Not Telling”. Rebecca demonstrated a very similar presentation to what I experienced only months earlier, but having now started the institute I saw new connections about how to help students experience real audiences and feel how their “showing” writing could impact their peers. As in any Summer Institute, I experienced the power of peer response when I met with my own group of five teachers each week to share our writing. I wanted my students to enjoy and learn from that experience as well – and I knew that would take a lot of scaffolding and coaching. Rebekah turned out to be the key.
So, what is “Showing Not Telling”? Student writing is often full of “telling” – vague language, lacking specifics, and lacking the literary sophistication to create vivid sensory pictures in a reader’s mind — pictures that help create a “you are there” sense as you read. Creating “you are there” is “showing.” It is a key component of compelling narratives. “Telling”, in contrast, is usually brief while “showing” is usually longer, active, and vivid. Brevity prevents me from detailing Rebekah’s nuanced approach. But its core goal is to train students to take a telling sentence, for example, “The room is a mess” and revise it to something that shows the mess without telling. A good showing example of this would be, “I had to force myself into Chris’s room. I squeezed through the thin gap between the door and door jam. I nearly got stuck because piles of dirty, wrinkled clothes obstructed the path of the door. A stale wet cardboard scent filled the room…..”
Following Rebekah’s process, every day my students practiced revising different “telling” sentences for homework, such as “The pizza tasted great”, “The teacher was boring”, “S/he looked terrified”. Each day I read five or so student writing pieces aloud, taking care not to identify the author. Then I modeled for students, as Rebekah modeled for me, how they could respond supportively and positively to student writing and how to respond in ways that might provoke revisions and improvement. I modeled for my students how to respond to each other in their peer response groups.
After reading a text, my daily responses mimicked Rebekah’s:
- “I really liked …. because…..”
- “When the author wrote….. it really does a good job of showing how …. s/he is.”
- “This comparison is great. The author used something called a metaphor when she said ….. It really creates a vivid image for me.”
- “How could the author show…..instead of writing … ? Anyone got ideas?
- “I want to know more about…..”
- Or I ask a question — commonly, “What do you mean by….?”
I never identified the author or asked the author to respond, although other students often did.
Soon students volunteered their oral responses to student texts, and I coached as needed. Repeated regularly, the process taught an important component of effective narratives and formed a frame students could use to follow in response groups.
Most students enjoyed practicing the process in “Showing Not Telling”. They wrote short pieces each night and heard feedback about effective writing each day, while I taught other aspects of the writing curriculum (dialogue, personification, correctness, sentence combining, and literature). Meanwhile, I created a positive, cooperative classroom environment ideal for nurturing young writers.
Eventually my students wrote longer, vivid personal narratives in response to more formal prompts and rubrics and shared them in response groups, using the responses I had modeled for them. Watching eight young adolescent response groups effectively sharing their writing, identifying what’s good and why, and talking about revision is one of the greatest thrills of my teaching career. Thank you, Rebekah!
Rebekah’s brilliant, transformative ideas inspired me to build further. Her ideas for comparing and identifying the difference in “showing” writing versus “telling” writing was very effective for the great majority of my students. But there always seemed to be those kids who just didn’t understand the difference. Sean was one of these students. He was distractible and lacked focus, today we might say he had ADHD. It was frustrating. A method of helping students like him bridge an understanding of that difference soon emerged. Sean inspired me to build with Rebekah ideas through a UCIWP initiative.
The UCIWP identified funding for 32 fellows to work on a book eventually called Thinking Writing. We researched and developed the book to assist all students to write more deeply, critically and thoughtfully. I was lucky to be invited to participate and discovered the power of pantomime and dramatizations to help all students, but particularly students, like Sean, needed something active and concrete, non-textual, to distinguish “showing” from “telling”. The demonstration lesson, “Bobby Be Bored”, in Thinking Writing, carefully focused on observing and writing about a dramatization of a distractible student (played by yours truly) who becomes bored in class during a monotonous lecture. I demonstrate all the gestures, eye movements, body language, posture, yawning and fidgeting that shows boredom –during the lecture. The lesson made a difference for all my students, but especially for kids like Sean who I taught in subsequent years. My students fully enjoyed the active learning that built upon Rebekah’s virtuosic practices.
I used Rebekah’s practices at community college several years later and experienced continued student engagement and enthusiasm. Her influence on me continues today, 44 years later, in my retirement, each week, when my peers and I share our writing at The Claremont Writing Group for feedback, and I hear her voice once again guiding my responses to their writing. Life-long learning! Thank you Rebekah!
Russell Frank is a retired middle school English, photography and publications teacher and middle school principal. He served the University of California Irvine, Writing Project’s Pathway to Academic Success initiative from 2019-2024 as a Thinking Partner with the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
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