Day 4 Blog: Personalizing

The Impact of Students Taking Ownership of their Writing

Takeaways:

• Limit feedback to a few, prioritized comments.
• Be social, share the work, use the comments as data to inform your rewriting.
  • These will allow the student to formulate the questions – having a student be specific.
  • For example, “I don’t understand.” “Okay, which part do you now understand.” “All of it.” This irks me to no end – I can help you, but I need a little nudge in a direction.

The Right to Personalize Writing Process

Two things necessary for students in writing:

• An environment which allows for success and shows them the action of writing
• Actual writing of extensive, expansive, frequent pieces with different purposes

Writing needs to breathe and move. – Anne Lamott

Writing workshop is a continual search for one’s own best personal process.

The next time you’re the observer, you look for other things, because now you know what to look for.

Outside perspectives change so much when you get in the game. Every time I watch a college game live from the stands, I think to myself, “I could keep up with these guys.” In college I would play intramurals on the court next to them begore their practices and there is absolutely no way I could. Each those guys would blow by me. I would be like Ryan Gosling in Remember the Titans – an absolute liability on defense.

You can love a piece you’ve written one day and hate it the next.

This reminds me of How I Met Your Mother (I think it’s from that show). Someone makes the joke that they kept a sweater for nine years and they look in the closet, try it on, and think to themselves “Why the hell did I keep that sweater?” Buyer’s remorse is not just in shopping.

Between writing times, everything I read or experience, every conversation becomes a well from which I can draw for the drafting I will do tomorrow.

I feel as if my whole character is drawn from a variety of sources. It shows in my conversations when I make a joke or quote tv shows or movies with friends (see text just above) It is displayed in my writing when I connect thoughts to a quote from an author who is much wiser than me.

The very act of selection causes them to look at their work and their personal growth as writers quite differently.

This seems to be a sort of revising on a macro scale – revising a portfolio of writing rather than the paragraphs in one piece of writing.

There is no more reason to finish everything we begin to write than there is to finish everything we read.

This is so difficult for me as I just like finish things. Even if these things have incredibly little value. I need to finish this show because it is the last season although the writing was crap 2 seasons ago. I could have used that time in a much better way. The same goes for books – although I do know a writer who reads the endings of the books BEFORE he even starts to make sure he likes it and does not waste his time. That might be a bit too excessive for me. I like finishing even the smallest of tasks – such as eating a dish that I don’t particularly like just because I get to check it off a list of having something completed.

You have to indent to write a paragraph. That is what writing is all about.

Hilarious – this whole blog post missed writing completely, I guess.

I haven’t said a whole lot in this blog post. However, it does not mean I did not like these pieces. There were plenty of good ideas and even more golden lines. I had to refrain from including more and more, otherwise my whole post would just be gold.