Reading and writing are, by their very nature, entwined; but they are separate skills with separate demands. Reading emphasizes close attention to the writer’s main idea, purpose for the communication, tone and method of narrative. Both are recursive activities although a skilled reader who annotates and takes notes may be able to skip a second read while a writer must see each draft as a work-in-progress. How many drafts are necessary is based on skill, experience, connection to the material and time, time between the last edit and the next, time to absorb both the strength and the weakness of the writing.

There is a thin blue line in teaching. It may not be as intensely adhered to as say, law enforcement, but teachers rarely criticize each other’s methods of educating students. Well, I’m here to say that the current methods of teaching writing have devolved into a perfunctory, limited and frankly, muddle-headed method that rarely helps the writer see and understand their own work, metacognition, that obnoxious word, is necessary, connection to the subject is crucial and consistent, timely and clear feedback is the only way a writer can improve. If you don’t return a submitted essay in a few days the student who stayed up late, visited a writing center, puzzled their way through a thesis statement and developed a healthy persuasive argument — all good writing is persuasive — will look at the grade, ignore the comments and learn nothing. And no, rubrics are unhelpful except for the teacher’s checking those nice boxes. Writing is chaotic, unkempt, and time consuming.

Luckily, I was a that sort of teacher — not chaotic but willing to veer off course to communicate good pedagogy, honest about the challenge of not putting a reader to sleep and even though I was a divorced mom who taught high school English full-time with a minimum of four preparations for four wildly different English classes, I gave constant writing assignment, read and commented, made suggestions, lavished praise and tried not to silence any voice that tried its best to be heard. One-to-one sessions are very helpful but may be unrealistic in a large class but for goodness sake, read the writing and say something nice and make suggestions for next steps. Carefully chosen peer editing groups are helpful. Put your best writers with a couple of less gifted students and, voila! 

What about grammar? What about it? Yes, it’s important but frankly any idiot can diagram a sentence except this idiot who found it both a waste of time and frankly, awful. If you are guilty of destroying your student’s love of words, love of reading their work aloud, love of finding new and awesome vocabulary, you are not teaching writing. This is where reading arrives in all its glory, reading material that teaches students how to write well, reading connected to their interests but writing that inspires. Do not, I repeat, do not, give them models from collections like “The 50 best essays that got so-and-so into Harvard.” Assign students to pull wonderful sentences from their reading—possibly keep a digital or notebook journal of these—allow them to include poetry, quotes, speeches, graphic novels, lyrics and yes, texts, blogs, IMs and lines from TV shows, commercials, movies, podcasts, etc. At some point there was writing and that’s what matters. This will help them understand the difference between plagiarism and admiration. Artists look to masters for inspiration, filmmakers, poets, novelists, essayists, journalists, help your students acquire their own group of favorite writers and don’t worry if they love Kanye more than Thoreau, because they will. It doesn’t matter.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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