The Right to See Others Write

I really enjoyed Spandel's right number six in The Nine Rights of Every Writer, the right to see others right. I think that this is one of the issues in English writing that doesn't get discussed very much. As teachers, we hold a lot of influence over our students most of the time and I think that if we show a love of writing and what writing means to us, then our students may in turn develop an appreciation for writing.

I remember as a student in my English classes how much I wanted to see what types of writing my own teachers created and what exactly went through their minds as they wrote. Did they have problems starting a paper like I often do? Do they also sometimes struggle with sentence structure and grammar? Even though I am going to be teaching English, my writing isn't always perfect and I think I am beginning to realize that my teachers probably weren't perfect writers themselves. I think that if more of my teachers in high school and college had modeled their writing process instead of just expecting us to complete a paper, the writing process might have gone a lot smoothly for myself.

I remember in my intermediate fiction writing class during my undergrad course at the U of M my fiction writing teacher read us part of a novel that he was working on during class one day. He even looked a little embarrassed as he admitted that the piece he read was far from polished and that he had a lot of work to do before the chapter would be completed. I remember how relieved I felt to see that my own teacher also struggled with issues such as dialogue and character development. I think as future English teachers it will benefit our students if we model to them what is going through our heads as we write and that even teacher's aren't perfect writers and also need to revise and edit and rethink their own writing.


My site for this week is a website with writing suggestions from other teachers and it contains different writing prompts and lesson plans.
http://www.teach-nology.com/ideas/subjects/writing/