The Key To Master Writing is to Write a Lot

“Write a lot.” Could this idea be the foundation of a sound writing pedagogy? It seems almost too simple. It also seems solidly in line with Peter Elbow’s ideas for the “teacherless class”and therefore, if we believe Berlin’s formulation from “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class”, perhaps part of a pedagogic philosophy that can easily marginalize certain students or be “co-opted by the agencies of corporate capitalism” (697; in Cross-Talk). But I’m thinking more in terms of establishing writing for students as something that ought to be done in volume in order to build it as a habit. In my own experience as a student, this never happened. Nor did I hear about the social implications of writing or the power structures inherent in the classroom, ideas that might pique student interest in writing’s possibilities and demystify the classroom enough to make students want to write more. Now I think these elements could be the keys to better writing.

Elbow opines, “If you are serious about wanting to improve your writing, the most useful thing you can do is keep a freewriting diary” (9). When I recently read Writing Without Teachers for the first time, the assertion that writing a lot is a good thing hit me as if it was completely new. And I think of myself as a writer! But some reflection showed me that my education, from grade school through college, had done very little to actually encourage me to write with any sort of regularity, or to revise what I did write. And so I produced little actual writing - just enough to get by. If this was the case for me, it may well have been the case for others. And if, regardless of our particular philosophical approach to instruction, we are in agreement as teachers of writing that we are trying to get students to write ”better” (however we understand that), then shouldn’t establishing writing as a habit be a priority? It is unlikely that any teacher of writing thinks that less, and not more, practice makes a better writer.

How might we encourage regular writing for students? Are daily journal entries a good idea, as Elbow suggests? Anecdotal evidence from our class suggests that some teachers find journal writing effective, while others are convinced that assigning a ten-minute freewriting exercise really would tend to produce pages full of the sentence “I hate this assignment” repeated over and over.