Writing Teachers Gather Round

[lunabee34]

I know a lot of my flist is in academia, and zulu and I have been talking about teaching and teaching writing specifically, and I decided to host a post about teaching writing.

So, if you teach or have taught writing at any age level, what are some of the strategies you use? Specific assignments? General thoughts about writing instruction?

If you have ever been a student of writing, what are some things your teachers did that worked? Failed abysmally? General thoughts about learning/teaching writing?

Recs for books, essays, or websites also appreciated.

Please feel free to share this around.

I'll put my thoughts in comments rather than the top-level post.

Comments

[zulu]

Very good point for teaching fiction. It's one of those things that we somehow expect students to absorb as they write, or to osmose from published fiction, but they don't. Even more importantly, and this is true of a lot of fiction techniques, is to show the effect of breaking the rules. "What if we broke the paragraph here? What would be emphasized? What would be blended together?" Like a big circular argument where both sides are supposed to look chaotic and ineseparable: I might put lots of dialogue together in one paragraph in that situation. Would be interesting to try to do as an exercise. Maybe, provide a short text, and see how students could paragraph it differently? As well as showing the "proper" way?

[lunabee34]

I like that idea about the pararaphing exercise.

I don't teach creative writing, but if I was, it would also be really interesting to have students write poems and then experiment with how the poem changes with different line breaks.