Want to make your writing sing?

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – Roy Peter Clark has written five books in the past 10 years. But he is a man of few words — and short songs.

His brevity, no doubt, derives from his mother, Shirley Hope Clark. The daughter of Italian immigrants and the first member of her family to graduate from high school, she wrote lovingly — but sparingly — about Clark’s early life. In the baby book she created shortly after his birth in March 1948, she used mostly one-syllable words to haltingly declare Roy a linguistic prodigy.

“Age 16 months, Roy is the talk of the neighborhood,” she wrote. “He can speak more than any child his age. He can sing every other word of Seesaw, Jack and Jill, Four Leaf Clover, besides a wonderful vocabulary. Mimics everything and everybody.”

As Clark remembers his mother, who died March 13 at age 95, she, too, was someone who dominated conversations. “I stand before you for the first time ever in the presence of my mother without the fear of being interrupted,” he said in a lighthearted opening to his eulogy of her.

Clark’s obsession is more with writing than speaking. For nearly four decades, he has worked to sharpen the writing skills of people in this country — and abroad. As the senior scholar and vice president of the Poynter Institute, this nation’s premier journalism think tank, Clark has won worldwide recognition as a writing teacher for media professionals and curious schoolchildren. This work has earned him the title of “America’s writing coach.”

But he is not your typical writing instructor. The lessons he offers often come in short bursts of song that he sings while accompanying himself on the piano. Back in 1994 during a national convention of minority journalists, Clark made a presentation on how reporters sent to cover a story could write it in their own voices. It was titled: “What I learned about writing from listening to the music of Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin.”

He talked about the similarities between the structure of music and the structure of writing. “I played different versions of the same song,” he said, “to illustrate how performers take the same material and translate it into distinctive voices.” Clark explained to the journalists how Redding’s and Franklin’s version of the song, Respect, evoked different emotional connections for listeners.

Since then, Clark says he has used music in every one of his lectures on writing. His goal is not just to hone the skills of journalists, as admirable — and necessary — as that is. It’s also to turn this country into a nation of writers. Writing, Clark argues, is “one of the three behaviors that define literacy in all cultures.” The others are reading and speech. They are the taproots of a smart society.

Good writing, Clark reminds us in his most recent book, How to Write Short, is not defined by the length of a sentence or the size of the words used. He recently sent his alma mater, Providence College, a report on how it could become a “college of writers.” It was just two pages long. One of his suggestions: “Combine ‘old school’ forms of writing with new forms of expression, such as blogging and social networking.” Another was to “spread the power and influence” of writing to distant points beyond the school.

For all of his efforts, Clark is not well known beyond the journalism profession and pockets of knowledge seekers in this nation’s higher education community. This has to change. Clark’s understanding of the linkage between writing and literacy — code-switching and acceptable language — and his ability to teach across generations are in short supply.

He is a national treasure that needs to be mined more aggressively.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes weekly for USA TODAY..