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

Writing with your students

[lunabee34]

I learned this from the National Writing Project when I was a Summer Institute participant (six week intensive writing course for grad credit).

I tend to start my writing classes with a short writing assignment that's related to the reading we're doing; I ask students to write for about 7 minutes and then ask students to share. I always write along with the students and share what I've written. It makes them much more willing to participate, particularly if the topic is something like, "A time you had trouble with a writing assignment and what you did to make that experience easier."

Peer Review

[lunabee34]

I pretty much have nixed peer review from my writing instruction. I used to do a lot of it and have gradually decreased until I have almost entirely eliminated it. I do it maybe once a semester.

Most students just blow it off. It's a wasted class period.

I'd love to hear from anyone who is using it effectively.

Rubrics

[zulu]

Does anyone have a good method of using a rubric? Or a successful way to generate a rubric for an assignment that shows what you're looking for in a finished piece?

[princessofgeeks]

I am so so interested in this but I do not have time today to contribute. Because I'm grading essays! But will check back.

Thank you.

[the_rck]

I think that one of the basic bits of knowledge about writing that nobody tells students is that the rules are different, depending on what kind of writing you're doing. You use the same tools and some of the same techniques, but you apply them differently for, say, an op-ed versus a poem or popular science book versus a literary short story or a romance short story. Knowing exactly how to write one doesn't mean having mastered all of them.

If you learn to build bookshelves and keep doing it until you're an expert, you're still going to find building a table challenging while you figure out which things are different. You'll have an advantage over people who've never built anything at all, but that won't automatically make you an expert.

Paragraphing in fiction, for example, is utterly different from paragraphing in non-fiction. I see a lot of people writing fiction and working on the assumption that short paragraphs are automatically bad. That results in scenes with action and dialogue getting jammed together and divided by how many sentences in the paragraph rather than by discrete events or actors. Paragraphs do different things in each type of writing even though they've got the same name.

I think paragraphing for writing narrative fiction needs to be taught as a different technique than paragraphing for other types of writing. I am not a teacher and have not figured out a great way to explain it, but I'm working on it because, when I beta read for people, confusing flow of action due to paragraphing issues is the biggest and most common problem I run into.

Some people really do think that paragraph breaks happen after so many sentences or so many lines of text and that using short paragraphs in fiction equals bad writing.

[chelseagirl]

Kind of too broad for me to know how to answer?