Teacher's notes: Love for Writing‏

It is important to help children develop a love for writing at an early stage of their schooling. Developing writing skills, in general, and teaching and learning of English as a second or foreign language, in particular, have always been immensely significant and equally perplexing for both students and the teachers in our part of the world.

It has been seen that academic writing in our state-run institutions and even in the more than 80 per cent of our so-called English-medium private schools, is mistaken for a theoretical subject that stands for learning a prescribed piece of text by heart to reproduce during examinations later on. Meanwhile, no importance is given to understanding the meaning or grammatical structure of even a single sentence in that text. Most of our students are not even aware of the basic principles of writing. It is after all a skill to be developed with practice and guidance and something that can be memorized. Therefore we often hear statements such as “I have learnt three essays” or “But Teacher, I can’t write a paragraph on ‘My village’ as I have not memorized it. You did not dictate it to us and it is not in our course anyway”.

During a secondary-level examination, a student saw the question paper and whispered into his class fellow’s ear, “Oh my God! There are no essay topics covered by the teacher in the options given to us in this paper.” And the second student replied, “Don’t be silly! Can’t you see ‘My father’ in the options list? The teacher had dictated an essay on ‘My best friend’. Use a bit of common sense and replace ‘father’ with ‘friend’ here.” So, the first student started his essay with, “I have many fathers, but Ali is my best father ...”

Such kind of silly mistakes happen, and they will continue to happen unless we take an initiative to develop a love for writing among students. It is so strange to hear students inquiring about the syllabus of story writing, essay writing, letter writing, etc. And it is even worse to find some teachers prescribing a few letters, essays and stories for them read in order to make up a syllabus for them.

Free writing

The first and foremost technique for developing genuine writing skills is free writing in which a teacher allows 10 minutes or so to the students to write whatever comes to their minds without deliberately focusing on any idea or worrying about making grammatical or spelling mistakes. The students must be assured that this work will not be checked by anyone. Then after 10 minutes, the teacher can ask them to stop writing and go through their content before selecting an appealing sentence or expression from it to make their essay topic. Finally, the students are told to show their piece of writing to any student or to the teacher, but only if he or she feels confident enough about it. The activity will not only pave the way for smooth flow of writing, it will also give a boost to students’ creativity.

Diary writing

Maintaining a daily journal or diary can be another valuable exercise. It offers an outlet for emotions, too. If a person makes penning down all the important incidents of the day, using short and simple sentences, a habit before going to bed each day, he or she will feel the difference within days.

Unfortunately, many of our teachers suffer from inflexible attitudes. They discourage and even condemn the students’ urge for writing poetry as they think it a wastage of time. This is a sheer injustice because such restrictions nip many beautiful roses in the bud. Teachers must encourage their students’ poetic and literary endeavours. It will definitely spur their natural flow of expression of feelings and thoughts.

Writing stories

Developing a story from beginning to end is also an equally interesting and useful tool for cultivating a smooth flow of writing while doing some brainstorming. The teacher may write the first part of a story to spark off her students’ imagination and then leave it for them to continue and finish.

As far as the role of subjective teaching, explanation of formal and generic writing, gridlines for paragraph and essay or letter writing, grammatical rules and vocabulary building are concerned, they are all quite significant, too. But these can always be taught at a later stage after the students have developed a love for writing.