No Right Way to Write

Empowering Students to Find Their Own Purpose

Marimar glanced at me nervously, essay in hand. “I want you to look at this. I’m not even sure it is an essay. I tried something here. It’s mostly dialogue. It’s a wreck. Just look at it,” she muttered as she threw her paper in my hands and walked away.

All I could do was smile. I knew Marimar was working on an essay about a conversation she had with a man on an airplane, a conversation she attributes to changing the path of her life. She had been struggling with form for a few days and I had been encouraging her to get her story on paper, but I provided her no answers to her structure woes. So when she told me she had tried something, and told me this with such trepidation, I knew that learning was occurring. Because this was her idea. Not mine.

Students have been conditioned from a young age to do exactly what we teachers ask in the classroom. We design lessons to build assignments with rubrics aligned to standards — all structured for guaranteed best practice instruction and learning. And to some extent, this is effective; it standardizes the learning experiences and creates consistent goals for us to strive for in our classrooms.

However, as we know, not every student learns the same way or at the same pace. Additionally, we know that students learn more when motivated to learn, not just when they are complying. And we know that students need ownership in this process to truly be active in their learning. But how do we accomplish these ideas?

For years in my composition class, I have been teaching a variety of essay genres. Each assignment had a rubric, and I provided mentor texts with designed structures. Students wrote and often produced beautiful texts. But the thinking — the scaffolding — was still created by me. I did their thinking for them.

A year ago I decided to remove the predetermined structures in an effort to encourage more risk-taking in essays by allowing the students to build their own structures. No surprise, it was near paralyzing for them, but I encouraged them to embrace this struggle, this feeling of chaos, in order to develop their ideas and to own those ideas. And it worked. Eventually.

I’m continuing the same plan this year, but I keep hearing students ask: But how do you want me to write this? How long should it be? Am I doing this right? Right? Is there one right way to write an essay? For me, the answers to these questions rely on the student’s purpose for writing the paper. I want to empower students with the understanding that they have a voice, and their writing can have purpose beyond a rubric and the walls in which they write.

The idea solidified for me last summer as I sat listening to GMWP colleague Karla Rempe speaking to the value of students understanding that writing is a process to facilitate learning, where students can grapple with the meaning of their ideas through exploration, where they can write to understand what they know.

On their essays, I want my students to do this by identifying their purpose for writing — a purpose that extends beyond the assignment. Students draft according to the topic parameters, such as reflecting on a transformative life moment. Then, when they complete that first draft, they make sense of what they are trying to say. I ask them to give me their first draft and reflect on their feedback sheet. What is their purpose? What did they learn about themselves through the act of writing?

This purpose, this new knowledge, then dictates the structure of the essay as well as the writing strategies students use to accomplish their purpose. They must decide how to best organize their essay to emphasize their purpose.

Marimar’s essay exemplified the beauty of this idea. That essay she was so timid about was brilliant. She wrote the essay primarily in dialogue, beginning and ending with words of the man who helped guide her epiphany while weaving in her thoughts in the moment (as well as some wickedly cool Little Prince references) to illustrate the immediacy of her change. And she did all of this because she knew her purpose: to show the power of that conversation.

What I loved most about her essay was not her brilliant language but rather her risk-taking. She tried something, unsure of the result. This willingness to own her learning showed her motivation to grow.

And so I smiled when she walked away, knowing that she was the first of what I hope is many students who will begin this same process in my classroom this year.