Archive for the ‘Writing about Writing’ Category

Notes from teaching at Xavier

Xavier University

Opening hooks are valuable in college writing. Being able to bring your personal experience to bear on the information being digested in humanities classes is a very worthwhile skill to cultivate in writing. When professors talk about how bored they are by the five-paragraph stiff lifeless essay, they mean that they can’t find a trace of the human who writes the essay. There are transitions and assertions galore, but none of the insight or imagination or wrestling that show critical thinking and growth.

The structure is not to blame. What is to blame is the lack of cultivation of writing voice. Kids need many many opportunities to explore their ideas in writing, tying their experience and thought lives to the information they are evaluating and narrating.

If a student does this well, and structures the essay in a recognizable format, you’ll have a student who hits a home run in college writing. When I read a writer who has command of his or her own writing voice, as a professor/teacher, I relax. I feel comfortable. I trust the writer.

Cross-posted on facebook.

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Squeezing Writing into the Holidays

Writing during the Holidays

1. Have your young writers make place cards for the holiday table. We liked using the American Girl Letter Art books.

2. Write a holiday newsletter: let the kids be the editors-in-chief! Interviews, anecdotes from the year’s activities, funny memories, photos—these can be complied in a patchwork quilt way. No need to write a single long narrative. Put each piece in its own box or section, like a newspaper.

3. Keep a holiday record book. You might want to start one that has the name of the holiday and the date (with year). On the record page, put the names of the guests who were with you or where you went to celebrate. If gifts are involved, list the presents and the “to” and “from” for each one. You might also recall foods eaten (with recipes! – makes it easier for next year), football scores (ha!), games played, funny conversations or jokes told. You might select a different scribe each year to be the note-taker for the event/holiday.

Writing during the Holidays

4. Put a basket on the hall buffet or mantle. Leave a set of beautiful pens and odd slips of paper (various colors and shapes). Instruct kids and parents to write a message of gratitude each day or every couple days. Then on the chosen holiday, pour them out in front of a fire, while sipping hot cider, and read them to each other.

5. Make home made gift tags! Then write names for gifts on them.

6. Thank you notes: yes, these can be wonderful. They can be texts, FB messages, tweets, instagrams, or genuine handwritten notes. The key is to remember to thank the givers (something even I am not good at). But make use of whatever technology helps you get it done!

Enjoy! There are so many ways to make writing a natural part of life, but holidays take it up a notch!

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Cherish the people you love—and put it in writing

WriteIn the last nine months, I’ve lost four friends (one online friend and three from high school). These friends were in their forties and early fifties. Each one “dropped dead” out of nowhere (no warning, no long illness). To say I’m still in shock is an understatement.

Each day I log onto Facebook, I see references to these friends (their profiles are still up and people pay tribute). The most recent high school friend, Alison, died, leaving behind two kids and a much loved husband, not to mention all of us—her friends. Breathtaking how quickly she is gone and not coming back—and how much we all miss her.

The rest of us live with the illusion that we’ll all get 70+ years on the planet. Today, with advances in medicine, it seems as if we all deserve 80 or more!

But the truth is: we just don’t know when our time will come. When I read the lovely notes written to the ones who’ve gone on before me, after they are gone and unable to read them, I’m reminded of how important it is to reach out to the people in our lives now, in writing, to say “I love you. I value who you are and have been to me.”

Ironically, my college boyfriend did that for me. It had been 30+ years since we had last spoken. In his note, he reflected back to me who I was at the time and compared that image of me to who I am today. It was powerful to read his words and to take stock of all the changes, all the growth, and even some of the losses. His writing = gift, to me, at this time.

These experiences (so much more common in our fifties, I’m sure) have given me pause. I’ve put a lot of who I am in writing (there would be a lot to read from me, if I were to pass suddenly, and that writing might be a comfort to the family and friends I would leave behind). But it occurred to me also that it’s important to express *to* those we value just how much we do love them, and why—and how they’ve been precious to us in our lives.

My mother, Karen O’Connor, has kept “grandchildren journals” for each of her grandchildren. Each time she sees any of them, she makes an entry (unless they are local, then she makes entries after special events). On the 18th birthday of the grandchild, she presents this journal as a snapshot of how her relationship with this person has grown and been cherished for 18+ years. Writing. Love. Personal and concrete. Able to be read again and again, even after she eventually leaves us (sob – don’t want to think about it!).

I say all this today so you might pause and cherish someone right in front of you, or even remotely. Maybe it’s a long lost friend, maybe it’s a relative, maybe it’s the child sitting across from you behind your computer screen right now. It’s good to say “I love you” and to mean it. It’s even better to put it in writing sometimes—to do the soul excavation of why this person has value in your life and how grateful you are to know this friend, parent, spouse, child.

Why wait until the loved one is gone to express all in your heart to say? Say it now. Write it now. Cherish the people you love, and let them have a concrete, tangible record of your love for them.

Pick one person today.

Cross-posted on facebook.

Image by Jose Roco

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