Analogies: Skating and Writing

I am standing, nose pressed against the glass, in the observation area of the ice rink at Tranquility Park in Omaha. Thankfully, the room is heated for this is the coldest rink in Nebraska, I think. I am watching Grace and her coach work together. Grace is practicing stroking around the outside perimeter of the rink. Roxanne is leaning against the boards watching. Grace pushes with one leg, then the other. After each stroke, she lifts her power leg and stretches it, long and with pointed toe, behind her for the glide. Her chest bobs as she goes. She stops by Roxanne when she has completed her circuit of the rink and gives the coach a big hug. Roxanne smiles, ruffles Grace’s hair, and I see her place one hand on Grace’s chest and the other on Grace’s back as she talks. Then she mimics the bobbing motion Grace was making during her first circuit. They laugh together.

Grace begins a second circuit, stroking carefully, her head high and arms outstretched. She still bobs a bit, but not as much.

And so it goes. Hour after hour, day after day. Grace and Roxanne work together on what might appear to be minutia, but are, in fact, essential elements of both the athleticism and artistry of skating. Painstakingly, Grace learns a complex grammar of the body that demands memory and understanding, the ability to calculate angle and speed, to draw apparently discrete and complex skills into a seamless composition, and the willingness to risk testing the limits of ability and genre – to press against prior conceptions of the possible and the lovely.

As I watch and as I put the word, “grammar,” to the work Grace and her coach are doing together, I realize that I have invoked a more expansive notion of grammar than one typically might as a writer, a teacher, a writing center consultant or director. I mean here to invoke “grammar” as the principles or rules attending an “art, science, or technique” and yet even this articulation is made inadequate by its conjunction: OR. (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grammar) For the grammar of skating like the grammar of writing is composed of principles informing the technique AND science AND art of the practice or craft. And these apparently constituent aspects of both skating and writing cannot be pulled apart from one another for the purpose of learning, then stuck back together again for the purpose of doing without some critical loss. To learn, for example, the principles attending the technique of a scratch spin is not to learn only the physical how, but to learn also and simultaneously the art of making such a move beautiful to spectators who have a conception of what beauty might mean in this context (the rules governing what will be accounted as beautiful), but who hope also to be surprised by a beauty conceived anew and extended – a beauty heretofore unknown and therefore breathtaking in that it changes the rules, the principles, the very definition of both the skill and the art.

The stroking that is the focus of Grace’s lesson with Roxanne this day will have its moment as a thread in the elaborate composition of a performance at some future time. This kind of stroking becomes the opening rhetorical move in a skating program: skaters use it first when they take the stage prior to the start of their music. The stroking is the projection of the skater’s presence on the ice. As an epideictic move, this stroking suggests the ceremonial quality of the occasion. This stroking is also an expression and demonstration of the ethos of the skater and of her performance: it communicates not only the skill and confidence of the skater, but the ease and grace with which she claims the right to speak, as it were, the right to perform this program at this moment before this audience.

Maybe, I think as I watch my daughter and her coach, traditional instruction in grammar and its alternative, the teaching of grammar in context (a practice so highly regarded as to have become axiomatic in writing centers) share a kind of impoverishment. Both approaches divorce the principles or rules governing usage from the art of writing, from the practice of producing not only grammatically correct text in a prescriptive sense, but also from the practice of producing writing that a reader might find beautiful where what constitutes beauty is simultaneously delimited and unfettered by genre and context. Neither approach accounts for the readiness for and delight of readers when by art one redefines convention.