Kate87

How to Teach Writing (paper1-final draft)

Kate Hatch
15 September 2008

How to Teach Writing
The best teacher I have ever had taught me that writing well is a skill that can be learned by anyone. She believed that having voice incorporated in a paper only made it stronger and encouraged all students to explore their writing styles to better themselves as writers. According to her, a good writer was someone who knew all the grammatical tools, could quote just about any work, but still had the ability to turn an old idea into a new, personalized one. In essence, her philosophy was, “ learn the rules first, then you can break them.” The experience I had with this teacher lead me to the realization that not all teachers are as committed to improving their students’ writing as she was, and that good teachers are needed for students to learn the basics of writing before they can become great writers.  It was her general goal to make all of her students better writers, even if that meant changing her style.
In the classroom, a natural role of authority and submission is always present. This is in part because of traditions that people who have knowledge, and it is assumed that teachers do, are usually in power over the masses that have less knowledge. Ideally, when this natural power distribution takes place, it allows for one person to lead all those under them to a place where they can use information effectively. In the classroom it is a teachers’ job to take hold of this responsibly to effectively guide his or her students, to become great writers.
This guidance begins in a strictly Bartholomae-based classroom. In this class students can learn to analyze great works, which is important because it shows students the art of writing, and it gives an example of what a person should be writing about and how they should be writing. When students learn mechanics and correct usage as well as organization they are able to create compelling arguments. However, under this particular teaching style only a specific type of writing is valued. The problem with this is that a student only begins to appreciate what their teachers appreciate, in turn causing the student to lose his or her voice.
For me, this exact scenario happened in my college research class. My professor believed that as students we were incapable of producing any original works. Every paper I turned in would be ripped apart because it was not what my teacher wanted to hear. Not only did this discourage my creativity, but it also inhibited my teachers growth because she was unwilling to see anything different from her own ideas.
Many fundamentalists believe that this losing of voice is necessary in the beginning of education because it allows for total control over the students by the teachers. However, complete control only allows lack of growth in the students case and eliminates potential for growth in the academic field itself. It is important for students to regain control once they have learned all the basics. In order to regain this power students have to find their own voice, rather than just repeating that of their teachers, fellow students and mentors.
In personal experience, gaining voice once it was lost is not nearly as complicated as many people had set it up to be. Once a teacher has given their students all the basics on how to write well, it is the students’ job to use these tools to write in their own way. The best way to allow students to improve their voice is simply have them write. Like in Elbows method, students need the opportunity to write without judgment in order for them to decide what is important to them and how to convey that to their readers.
One way to learn to write with personal voice is to simply write. This is a struggle for many writers once they have completed the Bartholomae training because they feel that the only opinions that matter are those of academics. To overcome this, teachers should start by offering some prompt and then slowly branching out to giving students complete freedom to write about whatever they feel is important. Prompts can begin as simple as “Describe Your Day” to important political issues. The point is not to have the most compelling argument, but rather to just get a student writing freely. Over time students will learn to use the tools they acquired in their traditional training to better their personal writing. The main argument behind not allowing students to rein free in the writing is that students are not academics and therefore do not have authority to write as if they were.
The question that should be asked is not whether or not students are capable of writing as academics, regardless of their training, but rather do students have something worthy to say that academics should be listening to? This is more than a question of voice, but a question of importance in the academic world. Shouldn’t the teacher student relationship always be a learning one? Does it really matter who is doing the learning as long as the collective is improving?  Good writing teachers are able to guide their students through the foundations of writing as well as allow their students to explore their creative sides.
To assume that only one way of teaching is correct would be naive because people learn in different ways. With this in mind, teachers should offer up many different types of teaching to insure that all of their students have the ability to become good writers.