My
students don’t spend enough time thinking about writing – and probably yours
don’t either. I understand why. After all, they have lots of other things on
their mind. And to be honest, I sometimes don’t think about writing as much as
I should and this is my field of interest, my passion, and the driving force
behind my paycheck.
As
a writer who spends a lot of time with other writers, I also know that too much
thinking about writing can be a bad thing – a dangerous thing. It often leads
to the two primary dangers facing writers (well the two leading dangers after
avoiding the siren call of Words With Friends) -- spending so much time
thinking about what to write or how to write it you actually forget to write.
Either rabbit hole can lead to madness and put an immediate end to
productivity.
The truth is that for most of our students too
much thinking is not a problem. I want to blame our current education system
for this lack of thinking. After all, our obsession with assessment and
interminable pushing to teach to the test has created a monstrous education
system which offers very little time for simple thinking and reflection. Even
worse, there are only penalties and no rewards for encouraging thought and
inquiry in the typical K-12 setting. But that is another blog post. I must
confess that even though I grew up in a kinder, gentler era of education where
there was time and energy devoted to reading, writing, and creativity, and my
teachers were not worried about how test scores would impact their job, I did
not spend a lot of time thinking about the art and craft of writing. And I KNEW
that I wanted to be a writer, so I can only imagine that my classmates spent
even less time on it.
I
believe that this is a problem, this lack of thinking about writing, we should
worry about as writing teachers. Many of my peers want to spend a great deal of
time obsessing about the two dangers I mentioned above – the what and the how
of writing. In fact, that is what my students obsess about the most as well
(hmmm, perhaps there is a relationship there). We spend meetings debating
whether to assign a persuasive essay or an analytical essay and, of course,
students’ punctuation choices often provoke hilarity, but is that where we
should be spending our time and our students’ time?
I
don’t want to dismiss the importance of grammatical knowledge or genre
awareness, but I believe we will not solve the challenges of either without
helping our student writers develop a deeper awareness of writing. Writing is not
WHAT we write and it is much more than following formatting, grammar, and
spelling rules. We need to help our students think like writers before they can
become writers. This concern is one of the primary motivations behind the “writing about writing” movement in composition studies. In WAW-based classes, students
read theory and research about writing studies, think and discuss their reading,
and then write about these ideas as well as study writing on their own.
While
I have moved my own teaching away from a WAW-focus, I still focus a great deal
of class time and energy on reflection and discussion about writing because I
believe that writers do obsess about what and how as well as why. Writers write but they also think about writing -- and, in particular, they think about their writing. I want my
students to become writers and I believe an essential part of that
transformation must involve learning to think like a writer which means we must
think about writing and how writers think and behave. I do this by leading
weekly class discussions on these issues and requiring students spend
reflective time each week on these issues as well. Not only do I hope to use
these tools to transform my students into writers, but this process also helps
me spend more time thinking about writing. Win-Win. Do you spend enough time
thinking about writing? Do you spend enough time encouraging your students to
think about writing?
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