Many students loathe the idea of writing in general. They typically see it as a time-consuming and unnecessary chore. This is not terribly surprising because as Yancey explains, “Writing has historically and inextricably been linked to testing.” (2). Of course, it is really just the writing that occurs in the classroom that is so dreaded because we see young people writing all the time in our modern age. And they are not just simply writing alphabetic pieces, they are often composing in multimodal contexts and for different rhetorical purposes. This is why teachers should draw from students’ experiences outside of the classroom in preparing relevant assignments for them. It excites me that so many young people do want to write, even if it is not traditional compositions that they are creating. The fact that they are writing blogs, tweets, making memes, posting YouTube videos, storyboarding their desires on Pinterest, and critiquing others’ posts demonstrates that they are expressing themselves and practicing rhetorical strategies for different purposes and audiences. This means they already have real-world experience in composition and they love composing as long as it is relevant to them, which is very valuable information for a teacher to have. Teachers can use this information as a tool for developing class activities and assignments that involve writing and that are not linked to testing, but will prepare them for testing regardless. These assignments do not have to be multimodal, but they frequently can and should be to engage more students. Essentially, teachers should appeal to students’ needs for relevancy in their studies by making them aware of how to find something interesting or relevant to them in each writing assignment. The idea is to get them writing, and once that has been accomplished, they will be on the road to testing better in writing without them even knowing it!
Source: Yancey, Kathleen B. “Writing in the 21st Century: A Report from the National Council of Teachers of English.” (2009): 1-9. NCTE. Web. 4 December 2012.
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