On Writing

A friend asked me yesterday how I promote writing fluency. She said her college students are convinced the draft should just come out perfectly. If you have to revise it, you've wasted your time. You should have just done it right to begin with. Because they are convinced it has to be right before they write, they are paralyzed.

I told her about a high school teacher I had who made us do all our writing in class. This system had its pedagogic flaws, because we were graded on first drafts. We never learned in this class how to revise our writing. It was also lazy, because merely giving reading and writing assignments and then judging them is not the same thing as actually teaching how to write. As my friend pointed out, though, at least it taught you to just sit down and write: no fussing over proper lighting or mood, no time to worry about if you really want to write, no waiting for inspiration to strike. Just get something on that page or fail for sure.

One thought I have about this is that fear of writing is in part based on a misunderstanding of what writing is, and particularly about what revision is. We think revision is only what we do when we write, and we see it as fixing mistakes. You've done a good job with writing if there's no red marks from your teacher on your page.

But when you (really) write, you learn what you think. You have the opportunity to learn what is clear for you and what you haven't really grasped yet. It deepens your thinking and allows you to enter into dialogue with others. But for writing to be this pathway to deeper thought, you have to take some risks. You've got to get your first thoughts out, and your first thought is rarely going to be your best thought. If it is, you probably are setting your sights too low. There's no way to the deeper thought except through the act of getting your current state of thought on the page. In other words, good writing, and therefore good thinking, requires hard work. 

So how do we convey this as teachers from elementary school to college? Taking care with how we teach about the writing process is one place to start. As my friend says, we tend to talk about it as if it were a linear process: first you plan, then you draft, then you revise, then you edit. The reality for real writing, of course, is much different. You think a little, draft a little, edit that typo because it bugs you, stop to think for a minute and move that sentence there, and rewrite that entire paragraph. Modeling and sharing evidence of that process repeatedly with students is really important.

I also think we need to look for and praise evidence of revision, persistence, thought and hard work even more than we praise "right" answers. To be clear here, I'm not talking about patronizing our students with "good try!" and its equivalents, nor am I advocating the idea that it doesn't matter if you get it right (or do it well) but only that you try. Product does matter. But we need to create a classroom culture that makes the paths to right answers, deep thought, and high-quality work accessible to all our students. So, when we see a kid getting a bit frustrated we should say, "way to stick with it, even though it is tough." When they finally get something right that's been hard for them, we can reflect back to them, "you thought you couldn't do it at first, but you stuck with it, and you got it right!" We can encourage students to reflect on how their thinking has changed: I used to think ______, but now I think ______ because ___________. We can look for examples of successful revision in our students' writing, and share the original version and the revised version. 

Ultimately, virtually all teachers are literacy teachers, regardless of what subject or what age we're assigned to teach. In order to teach well, then, we have to be readers, writers and learners ourselves.  If we don't authentically engage in real reading and writing, we can't help our students engage in real reading and writing, either.