Topic: Building Confidence in Writing

10-second review: In addition to teaching students how to write, try to help “basic” writing students to overcome their fears and doubts concerning their writing. “Basic” writing students have great difficulty in expressing their ideas. They have considerable problems with sentence structure, usage, spelling and punctuation. They also feel that they have nothing to say that will be of any interest to anyone.

Source: A. Reichert. Teaching English in the Two-Year College (December2004), 171. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: How can teachers plan to build confidence into students’ view of themselves as poor writers? They might try ten minutes a day for three weeks. The students begin the class by writing for ten minutes on a topic of their choice. At night, the teacher rewrites mistakes in sentence structure, usage, spelling and punctuation. The students then re-write the corrected 10-minute essay so that they can compare the two versions. By the end of three weeks teachers will be surprised at how much students are able to improve both their 10-minute and full-length essays. If the class is an entire year in length, the teacher repeats the three-week ten minute essays in the second semester.

Since the ten-minute essays take time to correct, use one class at a time for three weeks. Then shift to the next class. RayS.

But there is another problem. How does a teacher overcome the students’ feelings that nobody wants to read what they write? Try responding as a reader to the interesting ideas they express. Ask questions about their ideas. RayS.