In my 44 years in education, I never met a teacher more passionate about writing than Dan Bowden. His sincere zeal for helping students to find their own voices, to express their original thoughts in powerful language, and to provide sage feedback – including at times drawings of fire-breathing dragons directed at particularly egregious missteps – deeply affected Ransom Everglades students for generations. And although Dan would likely be more than disheartened at the quality of writing in the electronic world, I am confident that he would be encouraged by the place writing occupies in the RE curriculum.

More than ever before, we are immersed in the written word. Reading and writing text messages consume a great deal of our personal and professional lives. Many of us post ideas, opinions and more on Facebook, and our president and other political officials tweet compulsively and so frequently that anyone inclined to keep up with them can hardly keep pace. In many situations, expediency and the desire for rapid back-and-forth communication encourage terse messages, often in a kind of hybrid shorthand in which words are replaced by single letters and punctuation is largely eschewed. Finally, expression in texts and tweets is often awkward and careless, reflecting the haste with which they are often written. We use electronic media to communicate easily and immediately at a cost, and Mr. Bowden would decry the way that so much writing is governed by expediency.

Because students at RE write far more often than did students in previous generations, we do all that we can to ensure that they write clearly and well. Every discipline at RE celebrates and demands careful, precise writing and insists that our students master the necessary skills and habits of mind to express themselves cogently and confidently.

At RE, students understand that effective writing is a rigorous process that is an essential step in the learning process. They learn not only that clear writing can only proceed from clear thinking, but also that the writing process necessarily shapes and disciplines their thinking. Effective writing compels students to focus on their purpose and their audience and, that done, to make informed decisions about the content, vocabulary and style best suited to their subject and their audience. Moreover, students learn quickly that their understanding of their subject expands – or even changes – as they write about it. Anyone who has written a research paper knows well that the writing of the paper has played a significant role in informing and directing their research. Put differently, the beginning of writing does not signal the end of reflection.

I know that Mr. Bowden lived and taught by Mark Twain’s assertion that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” The spirit of Dan Bowden will continue to inspire students to become not merely capable writers, but powerful writers. The kind of writing that he insisted upon will be a model for future generations.

Mike Townsend
Humanities Department faculty member who is retiring this spring after 44 years of teaching.