Is there a writing crisis in this country and how might you use a strategy or two to get students to write to learn?
What many people talk about in the writing crisis are how students are not writing like they are, or used to. There is a disconnect between current writing styles and what are being taught or are expected to be taught in schools. Students are not interested in the writing done in class because it is not related to the writing they are doing outside of class (Content-Area Writing; Daniels, Zemelman, Steineke). Students are writing constantly, blogging, texting, journaling, social media (Facebook, twitter, etc.), even fictional writing on different sites. Students are writing, and many are writing well, just not in the context of classroom writing. This is where the crisis lies. I remember a comment my AP Language and Composition teacher in high school made on the first day of class, “I do not want to receive an email in ‘text language’ from you [the class] or your parents.” She then proceeded to show us an email from a previous student’s parent which was written in text message format. The class laughed and we moved on our merry way of “writing by the law” in her classroom. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this class and the teacher but I cannot help but think about how pertinent text messages are to any other prose we read in the class. Writing is writing, whether it be classical prose, poems, novels or even a message of 140 character limit (twitter).
Another aspect of this writing crisis is preparing strong writers for the work force, students will not find interest in these in class writing exercises and therefore not develop the strong skills to write a memo, or an e-mail, or even a business letter. All of these skills are needed in the work force but if students are not getting the interested in the usage of these skills then they will not practice them in their everyday writing let alone in class.
In my area of teaching, the classics, specifically Latin. I can fall into this trap of requiring students to write poetic epics like Homer or Vergil, or write prose in a similar fashion to that of Caesar or Cicero. Yet knowing how to summarize an entire book from the Aeneid in 140 characters covering all the key points is just as difficult. Helping students develop these skills in writing, and preparing them for the future, can be done in the context of a text message or Facebook post. Limited word count is just as important as content of the writing. I have heard, quality over quantity many times in my writing career. Why cannot this quality be in less than 500 words?
Some strategies I might implement in my Latin classroom would be: Fictional dialogue between the gods or goddesses, this would be based off of reading on particular deities and a students prior knowledge. What this dialogue could tell me is where the student was influence in terms of the gods and goddesses personalities (were they heavily influenced by Ovid or other contemporaries) and how well did they get the personalities of these characters across, was the dialogue clear in who was speaking, what type of dialogue took place, etc. Other ways to help students build these skills could be in a writing project that slowly builds throughout the year, or morphs with new material. I may have them write a fictional piece but then research the main ideas they address in the writing, or even have them write a persuasive paper on a particular aspect from Roman history, like the treatment of women, how slavery worked or even the laws of inheritance. I can see a lot of aspects where I can incorporate different styles of writing into my Classical classroom.
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Ms. Smith 