remember the hamburger!

In formal academic/report writing, every paragraph should have a topic sentence, supporting sentences and a concluding sentence, right? Remember the hamburger?                                                                            
Yesterday, I incorporated the hamburger into a workshop on report writing for about 15 staff members of Kivulini. It was the second session in an ongoing series, and one could not ask for a better audience. They were eager to learn and keen to practice such dry stuff as creating outlines, writing topic sentences and providing relevant supporting details. But oh how they struggled with it!


Writing concisely, and organizing information are something most staff members find intimidating. It's striking just how difficult it is for my "students" to practice basic (English) writing principles that I've been taught to follow since, oh, at least 6th grade. 


For example, the concept that every paragraph should focus on one main idea is frankly, a novel one; it's a battle for them to decide what that "one main idea" should be, and an even bigger battle to stick to it. There's also a curious (curious to me, anyway) tendency to devote a lot of time listing every single person in attendance at every single meeting, and then listing all the relatives of every single person at every single meeting and then noting where every single one of those people come from--beginning with their home region down to ward, district and village. Ok, I exaggerate, but there's a bit of truth in the hyperbole. 


I empathize with them because after all, good writing is plain hard work; reading and writing have a relatively short history in this still quite new country; and my Tanzanian colleagues are trying to write in their second or third language. Could I write an essay in French or Chinese? Heck to the no!