Creative Ways to Teach Writing

Students tend to look forward to writing courses as much as they do dental surgery. Writing teachers are required to get more creative with their lessons plans than ever before, especially with the availability of technology these days. Using a canned program or finding writing exercises on the internet are not stimulating enough to really grab most students, so teachers must use their own creative abilities to come up with other ideas.

Musical composition chairs

Teaching paragraph structure, introductions, conclusions and transitions can all be covered in one creative exercise. Students should open a blank word processing document and type the first line for a paragraph. When they are done typing, the teacher should tell them to move one chair to the left (or forward, or whatever, as long as they all end up moving in some sort of logical order). They read the sentence on the page and type a subsequent sentence. Then they move again and add another sentence. At each stage, the teacher should give them longer to read the paper, but don't let them ponder too long about what they want to say. When the students are one move away from their own chairs, instruct the students to add the final sentence. When they have all returned to their own seats, ask for volunteers to read. Most classes will have at least one paper that everyone wants to hear how it turned out, so getting volunteers is not usually an issue. The teacher can then discuss how the first and last sentences fit the other details (or didn't). Many students will express that it was difficult to just end the paragraph since it didn't seem to be coming to a conclusion. And they will also often comment on how the ideas fit together because of the words chosen even though the ideas were preposterous together.

Creating a hook

Writing introductions and thesis statements can also be taught in a creative manner. Put students in groups, preferably no more than 4 people per group, and give them several thesis statements. They are required to build an appropriate introduction to go with it. The straightforward theses are likely to have several different types of introductions, like a description or a quote. Include one thesis statement that is a bit more difficult. For instance, I use "Milk and paper are very similar." Students generally blow through the traditional theses rather quickly, but they end up spending more time on this one. What they end up doing is trying to come up with ways milk and paper are alike, which is, of course, not the purpose of the introduction. I remind them that the support for the thesis belongs in the body of the paper and the intro is supposed to get the reader interested in the paper.

Jabberwocky jargon

Even the mundane concepts in a writing course like punctuation can be taught in a creative way. Rather than doing the traditional worksheet, create sentences that are not real words. You can give other appropriate rules, like saying they are all complete sentences, if you want. Then give the students a key to the function of the important words and have them add punctuation. For instance, one sentence might read like this: Haebi llkuf ordke slibbp kyrwe dobassr. If you tell the students that llkuf and kyrwe are verbs, that haebi and slibbp are nouns, and that ordke is one of the coordinate conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so), they should be able to see that the construction is SV and SV, so they need a comma after ordke. This exercise forces them to look at the structure of the sentence rather than trying to decide if it sounds complete or if they need to take a breath somewhere in there. It is a creative way to teach punctuation and sentence structure.

Teacher creativity produces better learning

Motivating students in a writing class can be difficult, but a little creative thinking can help students understand writing concepts more clearly and make class more fun for students and teachers alike.