During the second five weeks of fall quarter, the School for
New Learning hosted its 1st Annual Month of Writing Challenge. The
idea grew out of a conversation among SNL’s writing program: Michelle Navarre
Cleary, Kathryn Wozniak, Kaitlin Fitzsimons, and I developed the idea during a
yearly wrap-up meeting, and as a creative writer pursuing my MFA, I offered to
lead the charge. We based much of what we did on the annual National Novel
Writing Month held each November (see http://www.nanowrimo.org/).
As part of the month, I taught a class called “WriteNow” that focused on a technique
that I called “JustWriting.” During at least two hours of each three hour and
fifteen minute class period, students just wrote. The atmosphere in this
computer room had an energy that pulsed and flexed with the clicking of fingers
on keys. When I would stop to look around the room, I saw mothers, grandmothers,
women, men, students, and professionals all becoming writers. Their focus was
incredible. Periodically I would invite them to get up and stretch, and many
found it a challenge to tear themselves away from their work. On their weekly
logs, many indicated that this was their most productive writing time of the
week. And in these five short weeks and five short classes, by writing together
and occasionally sharing experiences and products, these students grew
together, grew closer to their goal of 25,000 words each, and moved from novice
to experienced writers.
Why does
JustWriting work? Many argue that it doesn’t, and in the beginning of the
quarter some of these voices were those of my students. However, in their
longitudinal study of student writers at Harvard, Nancy Sommers and Laura Saltz
argue that faculty often ask students to “experiment” in the writing that they
assign, and I claim one way to become comfortable with experimenting is
JustWriting. Sommers and Saltz argue that
instructors that often expect college writers to come in as “master builders
while they are still apprentices” (132).
How does the apprentice become the master builder?
Experience: “Students who see writing as something more than an
assignment, who write about something that matters to them, are best able to
sustain an interest in academic writing throughout their undergraduate careers”
(Sommers and Saltz 127). They also found that writing experiences in college
mean more to weaker (or novice) writers than they do to experienced writers: “Weaker writers often speak with even greater passion
about the role of writing in helping them make the transition to college, in
giving them the confidence ‘to speak back to the world’” (129).
In
another analysis of the revision strategies of novice and expert writers,
Sommers found that novice writers think that their first draft is also their
final draft. They consider revising as “rewording,” or replacing one word for
another, sometimes out of a thesaurus. Experienced writers, by contrast, see a
first draft as a “scattered attempt to define their territory” and work on this
draft until they have figured out what they want to say. (384). I have worked
with many students in courses where they are assigned one, two, three or five
page papers, and inevitably a student says that he does not know what he wants
to say. Another student, meanwhile, pens an excellent thesis statement in the
conclusion of the paper. Though they did not know it, they were using writing
to figure out what they wanted to say. By contrast, in WriteNow students were
asked to write a minimum of 25,000 words, but were not asked to “say” anything.
At the end of our five weeks, almost every student said that he or she ended up
somewhere different from where he or she began. In this way, the course forced
them to experience some of the techniques used by experienced writers. Because
they did not have to create a final draft, students were free to stay in the
exploratory, “experimental” stage of writing until they figured out what they
wanted to say. Now that they have overcome this hurdle, this fear of writing,
the hope is that they might spend more time in a first or rough draft, and see
revision as an opportunity to reveal the structure and subarguments of their essays
for all of their classes.
One
of the reasons that this early drafting process does not happen for novice
writers is because writing anxiety is especially prevalent
among adult students. This is echoed by many of the students in my class, who
said that they chose to accept this challenge because they wanted to become
more comfortable with writing. And in fact, Martinez, Kock, and Cass found that higher levels of leisure writing were
associated with higher levels of writing self-efficacy, and also that higher
levels of writing anxiety were associated with lower levels of writing
self-efficacy: “Although quantity of writing does not
predict quality of writing, students who engage in more free writing or leisure
writing are able to express themselves creatively through writing without
feeling constrained by the rules of grammar or structure of formal writing
assignments” (357). In their final
presentations, students demonstrated the creativity that this process had
afforded to them. Many had plans for what they would now do with the writing
they had produced in the course. Some would produce one or multiple ILPs;
others would continue a novel or a memoir; still others would finish the work
they had begun on their Advanced Project. All had taken a step toward becoming
experienced writers.
So,
as teachers of writing across the SNL curriculum, what does this mean for us?
It means that students will further explore issues of a given topic in writing
when given the time and a word count benchmark rather than a rubric and a
grading scale. It means that encouraging students to journal and freewrite well
before a final paper is due will result in more refined and structured final
papers. Finally, it means making room for experimentation through writing in
courses where students are dealing with new material and new terminology which
might make them anxious. Giving our students, and ourselves, time to JustWrite
will lead to increased levels of creativity, novice writers more likely to
write with the authority that we ask of them, and decreased levels of anxiety
among our adult students.
Works
Cited
Martinez, Christy Teranishi, Ned Kock,
and Jeffrey Cass. “Pain and Pleasure in Short
Essay Writing:
Factors Predicting University Students’ Writing Anxiety and Writing
Self-Efficacy.” Journal of Adolescent and
Adult Literacy 54.5 (Feb. 2011): 351-360. Print.
Sommers, Nancy. “Revision
Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult
Writers.”
College Composition and Communication
31.4 (Dec. 1980): 378-388. Print.
Sommers, Nancy, and Laura
Saltz. “The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman
Year.”
College Composition and Communication
56.1 (Sep. 2004): 124-149. Print.
