Write On

By Richard Carson, PhD, Senior Editor

At the start of every term, I used to ask myself two questions about the intellectual location of my students: Where are they? and Where do you want them to be?

These questions had a particular relevance with regard to writing classes. Many of them began with a kind of bifurcated writing life, in which they wrote one way for themselves and another way for school. Some hinted at journals, stories, and poems. More often, at least from what I could gather, their writing was interpersonal: letters in the early days, emails in later years.

When they made the leap to a more academic format however, something happened. So often their papers were, for want of a better word, nervous. They were halting and repetitious, like a speaker with a half-prepared speech. It was as if the act of writing stopped them. Write in any way you can, I would tell them, write for different audiences, including yourself. Where I wanted them to be was a place where some of their creativity could drive their academic writing. In retrospect, perhaps the one who needed to be more creative was me.

These days, students write a lot and in a way that forces us to expand what we mean by writing itself. Emails are supplemented if not supplanted by instant messaging. Our students write blogs, tweets, and Facebook profiles. Many design web pages for themselves, their friends, their bands. They film narratives and record poetry set to music. As Traci Gardner states in her book Designing Writing Assignments (Urbanna, Illinois: National Council of Teaches of English, 2008), "Writing is placing words on screens and paper, recording words and sounds and images on video, arranging words and images and sounds in audio and video recordings and creating links between all these means of expression (29)."

Ms. Gardner's book reminds us that our lesson plans for writing assignments need to tap into these areas of creativity. While some of us may not be practitioners of all of the media our students use, we can use that media to help students realize that they have ideas, and they can develop those ideas in traditional and nontraditional formats. Students might imagine characters writing Facebook profiles, Ebay adds for key elements of setting, Tweets for key elements of plot. As teachers, writers, and editors, we can learn from where our students are and move them forward to write with confidence and competence.