The Art of Teaching Writing

To teach writing is to help students realize that what they say matters, that it has value. I didn’t also think of teaching writing in this manner though. My first year of teaching, I quickly realized I needed to step up my game and think critically about what helped me fall in love with writing.

As my business name, Ink Sanity, shows, writing takes me through a range of emotions, but the overall freedom of expression I get through writing outweighs anything else I go through over the writing process. It took me a few years of teaching to figure out exactly how to structure my teaching of writing in order to get my students to see themselves as writers who had valuable ideas to share. Once I had a structure figured out, my students mastered any type of writing structure I introduced- expository, narrative, argumentative.

Teaching writing is a combination of getting students to read good writing, understand the writing process, and most importantly help them to translate their thoughts onto paper.

I hope to share more specifics of the writing routines I established, as well as resources to help you and your students in your own writing process in future blog posts. For now, I’m curious as to what you think the art of teaching writing requires? I’d love to hear your thoughts!