Humanity in Teaching Writing

 Hello Everyone,

This week I learned that there are better ways to teach writing than the ways we have learned. At first, I thought that Murray’s notion of “Teaching Writing as a Process Not Product” was Utopian and far-fetched because how can we teach, if not by example? How can a student learn to craft a sentence, without the example of one? How can a student learn the use of a semi- colon without an example of one? I am a visual learner, so these thoughts instantly came to my head. But now, I see I was taking Murray’s idea in at surface level. I thought, why does Murray say to work on mechanics AFTER everything is done? I would be upset if I wrote this gigantic paper and then had to rewrite and reformat everything to make it correct, but now I see that the object of it is to find your voice and write as YOU would write, not any other famous person’s work we spend our lives studying, or even, our teacher’s style of writing. The time where I internalized this, three weeks after reading it, was when Dr. Cauthen explained the importance of freewriting when we were talking about students who do not want to share certain traumatic experiences and I suggested it (freewriting) a simple diary entry that would encourage the student to write and then decide what they want to share. I honestly thought of this out of empathy for the student’s situation, but then it turned out that freewriting is always valuable, for anyone, may it be a traumatic situation, or not. Then I thought that anything artistic, which I believe writing is, should require empathy and encourage the writer’s agency and independence in its conception! So, I pretty much had an “AHA!” moment because Murray’s article, freewriting, and the way that we brainstormed how to effectively help students with essays, all came together and made sense. There is a sense of humanity that has often been abandoned when it comes to teaching literacy, or anything really. We are not simply learning to teach by design and by theoretical frameworks, but with the thought in mind that we are teaching real human people with real human minds, real human experiences, and real human emotions. That’s how we can encourage the creation of “live writing,” without shutting people’s humanity out. (Murray 3)

Comments

  1. Hi!February 12, 2021 at 1:26 PM

    I agree. I think many of us have been taught to write a certain way, but there are other ways. For me as a writer and a teacher, it's about the finished product and not the process. By that, I mean I don't grade a student's work as it is in the process and I try to worry about things such as semicolons once I have the story written. There is a time to be a writer and time to be an editor. The more I teach and the more I write, the more I learn those times shouldn't overlap.

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