How To Teach Writing

You don't teach writing. People teach themselves writing by learning how readers react to their work. As a teacher of writing, your job is just to help people to find out what the real experience of readers is.

So the most important thing, whether you're teaching one to one or whether you're teaching in a group, is to make sure that people get honest feedback. So, in teaching one to one, it's important to prepare before the session. You do that by reading through their work and by recording your honest impressions as a reader, not as a critic, not as a writer, not as a friend or a colleague, but as a reader.

And the best way to do this without slowing down the experience of reading is to confine yourself to just making two marks on their work. Just tick anything you like, even if you don't know why you like it and underline anything that gives you any sort of problems at all. It might be that you had to read it twice.

Even if on the second time you understood it, it's important to note down that you did have problems with it. If it was confusing, if you just didn't like something about a word, even if you don't know why you didn't like it, just underline it and you'd be able to know later on. So now, when you come to have the session with the person who wrote this, you show them the marks that you made, so that it's all open and honest, and then you give your feedback in three parts.

So, the first part is what you liked best on what they wrote. The second part is what gave you problems. And the third part is whether you got any suggestions to improving it.

Now, in doing this, you start with what you liked best about it, because that shows that you're on their side, it shows them that any criticism that comes later is well meant. And it's just as important for you to know it's well meant as for them to know that, it stops you from feeling like you're being overcritical. So, the second thing is to tell them, what gave you problems while you're reading it, and again you just stick to your experience of reading it.

In summing up what gave you problems, you should look first at structural things, at their approach, whether they started in the wrong place, whether they're being too detailed, whether they're writing in the third person, when it'll be easier if they just said “I did this. I did that”. Then, you look at problems within sentences if the sentences are too long and complex or if there are big grammatical problems in them and then finally, you would look at smaller things to do with editing, things like spelling, punctuation capitals, that sort of thing.

So, the idea is that you spend most time on the things that make most difference to their piece of writing and that is the structural stuff. So, the third part is, if you have any suggestions to make their writing better. It's important to separate this from just telling them what your problems with the piece were as a reader because your suggestions might not be the right ones.

They might be in the best position. In fact, they often would be in the best position to fix their own problems. Again, keep the suggestions from the point of view of the reader.

What would you have liked to be reading, not what would you have written. And after the session, sum up what you've covered and send it to them so they could refer back to it when they'll be writing in the future or when they're coming to edit something. If you're teaching a group, then again, people would learn most from the other people in the group, rather than you.

And it's your task to make sure that the other people in the group present their feedback in the most helpful way and present it as readers, again, rather than as writers. So in teaching writing, you just need to remember that you're helping people in coming up with their own answers, rather than giving them yours. .