The Importance of Voice in A Dose of Writing Reality: Helping Students Become Better Writers by Christine Love Thompson

It is essential to understand that classes taken in grade school do not give students a full understanding of each subject. With the topic of writing, there will always be a new lesson to learn, an aspect to improve, or a differing way to explain. Author Craig Vetter states in Bonehead Writing, “This is your enemy: a perfectly empty sheet of paper. Nothing will ever happen here except what you make happen.” Each story, essay, or response comes from a writer’s experiences. With each attempt at a new piece comes an underlying story of emotions the writer is facing. Each person’s writing is unique and the ideas people have are related to their past experiences and what they believe to be familiar with when deciding which writing style to use. As a high school student, I have learned many things about writing that helped me become the improved writer I am today, but the most essential advice I have received is practice makes perfect. Although there is no actual perfect way of writing, I have discovered that each essay I write, my writing improves. It is easier to spot mistakes, find areas to improve, and ponder elevated word choice to use.

Murray is insightful not only to instructors but also to learners. Murray argues that the challenge facing writing is the fact that teachers have treated it as a product rather than a process and the same concept passed on to students. The author holds that the main problem with this view is that students get to receive irrelevant criticisms that are not related to their learning goals. While I tend to agree with the author based on the arguments presented, it is notable that Murray has paid little attention to the idea of education in the contemporary world. In most learning institutions, the outcome of the writing is considered more than the process. As a teacher paying attention to the process of writing but not be consistent with the students, who are mostly driven by

From elementary school to high school, I was taught that my writing had to be structured and follow strict criteria. After I arrived in Mr. Mukherjee’s ENG 102 class, I was given the opportunity to express my creative freedom through words and graphical pictures. It can often be difficult and challenging to improve upon my own writing abilities unless motived with an idea in mind. When looking back on my time at ASU, I thought about the goals that I wanted to address for myself and the course goals that my instructor had set for the class. These goals include ones that I had accomplished to the best of my ability and ones that I need to address as well as improve.

Most elements of writing (development, organization, and style) fit task, purpose, and audience. Some identifiable mismatches.

This course offers numerous opportunities to improve our writing. In this class, I not only enhanced the skills I already had, but also learned new writing concepts. Before I took this class, I knew that my writing is poor, and I have always wanted to improve it; however, I did not know how and what aspects of writing to improve. So, I came into this class with the ambition to improve my writing, and I have accomplished my goal although there is still room for improvement. At this point of this course, I have learned the elements that successful writing is composed of, and I am now able to categorize the various techniques that can work together to define strong

Students are instructed on how to develop and organize their writing by developing a plan or out line to follow. Teachers should discuss with their students how to effectively plan out their writing strategy. Students need to be taught to question themselves about the purpose of their writing. Questions like; “Who am I writing for?” or “How will I organize my thoughts?” are two general examples. Gersten mentions the importance and purpose of the first draft and how it provides a concrete reminder for where the writing is going. The plan and its draft provide a common language for teacher and students to share making communication easier. He also speaks of the strengths of the revision process. Gersten illustrates how peer-editing can be a useful tool to employ during writing.

In my English 1010 class, I have learned to do a number of things through writing essays. I have written a Literacy Narrative, a Discourse Community Analysis, and a Writing Research essay. Firstly, I have learned to identify how an author’s purpose, audience, genre, and context determine effective writing. The purpose of the literacy narrative was to help me understand myself better as a writer (Jones 1). My teacher was the intended audience of the narrative. The genre of the narrative was non-fiction because it was about my experience as a writer. The context of writing made my writing more interesting and more effective. All those things make effective writing because you have to know what you need to write about and who is receiving your writing. I displayed these skills by going into detail of my experiences with reading and writing through my life. In the narrative I shared how fun and exciting it was when my second grade class got the opportunity to write a book, A Book of Future Astronauts (Writing is Good).

Logan Pearsall Smith once said, “Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each other’s fur.” All be it an overwhelmingly disgusting image, Smith’s words are true when it comes the art and science of putting pencil to paper. In the classroom, students should be able to be vulnerable, honest, accountable and “real” in their writing so that they may grow to become better writers. It is the responsibility of the teacher to insure a quality learning environment that is conducive to these three factors. Observing the writing process and identifying the experiences within, be them personal, direct or indirect, contribute to how the educator teaches students using best practices.

In his essay, "Teach Writing as a Process not a Product," Donald Murray outlines the major difference between the traditional pedagogy that directed the teaching of writing in the past and his newly hailed model. Traditionally, Murray explains, English teachers were taught to teach and evaluate students' writing as if it was a finished product of literature when, as he has discovered, students learn better if they're taught that writing is a process. For Murray, once teachers regard writing as a process, a student-centered, or writer-centered, curriculum falls into place. Rules for writing fall by the way side as writers work at their own pace to see what works best for

Prior to entering class, I deemed myself a competent writer. However, I quickly discovered that my writing involved mediocre writing precepts. In contrast to the principles of scholarly discourse, my writing held the tenets of conversational writing and failed to meet academic standards. Furthermore, much of my poor writing was akin to a deep-rooted habit that I found humbling to admit and challenging to correct. Passive voice, unneeded words, long sentences, were a few of the obstacles that impeded my journey to effective writing. However, using peer reviews and an editing checklist I slowly began improving my skills as a competent writer. I also found that reading concerning writing provided supplementary methods to improve my skills as a scholarly writer. Implementing these innovative techniques, I slowly began to

As a freshman at Linden High School, I have learned that writing provides students with the necessary communication and thinking skills necessary to succeed in school. Before I enrolled in ACL, I was a lazy writer who detested every aspect of writing. Now, I have learned to embrace writing challenges and learn from my mistakes. Writing persuasive and research papers proved to be difficult for me because it required organizational and research skills. As the year progressed, I began feeling more confident in my writing skills and looked forward to expressing my ideas on paper. As a writer, I have gained the knowledge and tools to grow as a student.

On a scale of one to ten, how good of a writer are you? Would you categorize yourself as a two because you hate writing and are poor at the whole writing process? Or maybe an eight because you do not mind it, but could use improvement on revising? There are so many pieces that are required to create a sound paper that has strong content, organization, grammar, and ability to grab the reader’s attention. Because of this, there is no simple, clear-cut definition of “good writing.” Even though “good writing” cannot be easily defined, Nancy Sommers, who teaches and researches at Harvard University where she has served a number of roles over nearly three decades with a focus on the development of high school and college students’ literacies

The article, Call a Meeting with Your Writing Teacher Self by Ruth Culham, surprised me. I was not aware that writing wasn’t really a big topic until the 1980s. The idea that writing is not just a linear set of steps was stressed throughout my writing education. I agreed with Culham’s statement that writing is a “highly individual, creative process”. The process should be looked at as stages, not steps. The fact that writing has not been stressed on in the past means that many students my age and older probably never really learned the best ways to write. I think back to some of the classmates I had and they could only regurgitate what they learned. It’s up to us, as teachers, to focus student writing on “learning how

Writing anchors a literate life, and we know that students who write well will reap the rewards long after high school is over. With this in mind, we have one year to get our students to discover the value of writing; we have one year to help them understand that we don’t assign writing just to make the teacher look better. If we are to be successful in getting our students to turn the corner as writers, we must put them in a position to see that writing is much more than a school-induced hoop to jump through

Mrs. Brown, my freshman English teacher, sparked my interest in writing as a form of creative expression, rather than the mindless exercise previous teachers had taught me. Instead of encouraging her students to write alongside formal guidelines, Mrs. Brown initially allowed each student to demonstrate their writing abilities through a classic narrative. Her reasoning: narratives allow her to know her students writing style, their strengths, and their weaknesses. It was this unrestricting and optimistic attitude of Mrs. Brown’s which compelled me to express myself clearly in my writing and disregard any inclination of forming an essay which catered to a specific rubric.