Writing Fearlessly

Two obstacles face a beginning writer: 1) what to say and 2) how to say it.

Every kid has at least 14 hours every day of everyday experience to write about; she just hasn’t learned to find the material in it. To be fair, even grownups haven’t learned that. Most of us charge through our days like navy cruisers, carving a path in waters that close behind us as if we’d never passed. We should be more like farmers, mindfully plowing furrows to be planted with memories, goals, and plans.

Or, to drop the metaphors, everybody has plenty of material in their own experience; we just need to teach ourselves to notice and cultivate it.

As for the other great obstacle, think about it: from kindergarten, or maybe even earlier, the typical language arts program bombards kids with rules about periods, commas, capital/lower case letters, parts of speech, subject/predicate, spelling words. Rules, rules rules! Some little rebels could care less (rules are for breaking). But others, perhaps most, start out wanting to please their parents and authority figures. Front-loading their language-arts study with a bunch of rules that may seem arbitrary and abstract may only serve to frustrate them.

Discarding the rules is not the answer. They need those punctuation flags and proper syntax to communicate effectively. But they have plenty of time to learn it. There’s no need to attack every mistake on every paper with your red pencil.

In Wordsmith, I encourage students to not worry about spelling or punctuating everything correctly, but to give it their best guess and focus on content. To that end, messy drafts should be encouraged. For example

• Offer five minutes of extra screen time, up to 30 minutes, for each mistake they find and correct in a first draft. Granted, this can be tricky as they’ll make mistakes on purpose. But your eagle eye should be able to detect those purposeful ones (and besides, they have to know it’s a mistake in order to make it, so obviously they know something). To balance it out, take points off for each mistake they didn’t correct.
• If you’re teaching students of similar age, give them each a red pencil and let them correct each other’s papers. Offer some reward (M&Ms or fruit snacks or quarters) for each legitimate mistake they find in the other guy’s paper. This refers to mechanical errors, like spelling and punctuation, not content.
• For an art project, ask the student to design and make a poster with a letter-sized blank space in it. Under the caption, Nobody writes it right the first time, feature a “messy draft of the month” in the blank space.

These are ideas off the top of my head. A perceptive student may not need gimmicks to be persuaded, just your reassurance that mistakes are okay, and far preferable to sitting frozen over a blank page.

As for what kind of mistakes to look for, and how to go about fixing them—Wordsmith and the Teacher’s Guide to Wordsmith include extensive material on that subject, including handy checklists and examples of messy drafts..