The Art of Writing and Revision

Introduction / Rationale

Picture it: you are standing before a room of twenty-something thirteen-year-olds. You have a slide pulled up on the SMART Board behind you detailing the requirements for the writing piece you have just assigned. You have been speaking for the past three minutes, taking very few breaths, pushing through your need to pause, feeling your palms sweat as you prepare for the groans and the eye rolls and the “bruhs” called out into the void.

This has often been my experience as I assign a writing piece to my students. No matter how enthusiastically I tell them that they will be composing an argument or explaining a concept to their audience, I am met with frustration and the frequent insistence that my students “can’t” write a whole essay, that I’m “doing too much” for suggesting that they can.

Some observations I have made regarding why my students find it so difficult to see themselves as writers are as follows:

1. My students experience a profound learned helplessness when it comes to composing their own writing. When asked to re-state the question in their response, they ask in turn for a sentence starter. I am tempted to ban the word “can’t” in my classroom.
2. They have a limited understanding of grammar. My students know that the beginning of a sentence is a capital letter and the end is a period, but they don’t have a clear way to explain what should go between the capital letter and the period. They have no concept of subject and verb, or why they need to know what either is. Of course writing is more difficult when the basic rules are unclear.
3. What I ask my students to write about is boring! Our curriculum’s prompts are designed to prepare students for the state test rather than asking them to authentically engage with a text, with the world around them, or with their own thoughts.

None of these observations is the fault of my students. Writing is difficult. And the types of assignments that helped me develop a sense of efficacy (and excitement, joy) around my own writing seem to be nonexistent in the curricula that our schools teach today. I still remember the start-to-finish process of writing my first research paper in seventh grade. It was a months-long project that required me to think critically about what would interest me, to research and learn about my topic, and to write and revise many pages in which I had to combine my learning with my analysis of that learning. In contrast, the curriculum and pacing guide that my district uses instructs my students to write five-paragraph essays in about seven days of instruction. The goal always seems to be to get through as much content as possible. Within this structure, it is difficult for students even to recognize, let alone internalize, the importance of a clear and precise verb, the power of active over passive voice, the interest you can build by varying your sentence types and lengths. But we know that in order for students to write well, they need to be taught how to write well.¹

This curriculum unit is meant to correct a small part of what I think is not quite right about the way we teach writing in my school and, I imagine, many other schools like mine. My students and I will first take it back to basics – focusing on the functionality of a sentence, learning and internalizing that a sentence is a collaboration between subject and action. Our first assignment for this unit will be six-word memoirs in which students will showcase their knowledge of what makes a sentence interesting and exciting. The brief and personalized nature of this assignment is meant to help students feel empowered as writers, while they’re also building their confidence through clear grammar instruction.

However, we will not stop at six words. Over the course of the unit, students will add to and revise their memoirs bit by bit until they have approximately 250 words of writing about themselves and their value(s). Throughout this writing and revision process, students will participate in workshops wherein they will share their writing and respond to one another’s writing. As a part of our writing and revision process, we will review (through mini-lessons) narrative techniques such as dialogue, imagery, and characterization. But our true focus will be on how to incorporate repetition, strong word choice, and sentences of varying lengths into writing, all to enhance students’ ability to convey their meaning. Students will find creative ways to incorporate all (or most, or some) of these elements without being told exactly what to write. In this way, they will find and wield their own authorial voices. Students’ final essays will be accompanied by a graphic (created digitally or by hand) showcasing the six-words that started it all, to be displayed in our hallway and/or on our school’s social media.

These products (six-word memoir, short memoir essay, graphic representation) are the objective and observable goals of this curriculum unit. Another, less objective, more spiritual, goal of this curriculum unit is to help my students see themselves as writers. My hope is that by their taking more time to write a shorter piece about something less related to our mass-produced curriculum and more related to their individual interests and feelings, my students can take more ownership of the writing (both the product and the process). This, in turn, will help them feel a greater sense of ownership over the writing that we continue to do throughout the year, even when it might be less exciting or personalized.