Reflections on the Chat with Amie Wolf (2)

I couldn’t agree more with Amie’s pedagogy of encouraging basic writers to “focus on narrative and autobiographies” and form a habit of “write everyday”— informally. From my own experience and also by noticing others’s, I found out that most of times, either because that we have difficulties in finding something in our mind to write down about or because that we couldn’t get anything exciting and enjoyable from the very conduct of writing, we feel that it’s boring to write and has no fun at all, furthermore, we regard it unworthy, meaningless and even procedural—to show the writing to teachers is the only purpose—as a result, we are becoming more and more reluctant to write—then no doubt, we’ll fail in the actually beautiful, magical and incredible Writing Kingdom! What a pity!!

It’s not because our life isn’t interesting at all, it’s not because we are really sorry writers, and also it’s not because we were born with no talent of writing! IT IS because we seldom pay enough attention to our daily life, seldom observe it with our eyes and minds, afterwards, feel it with our hearts! Everyone has great potential to become a wonderful writer, only if he or she tries—in appropriate guidance and direction!

Here comes the very matched way—to “focus on narrative and autobiographies” and to “write everyday” informally! WHY? Because narratives of whatever events are coming from our real daily life (here not including fictions) and autobiographies are the most widely and closely related to ourselves which would most likely fire up our eagerness and enthusiasm to write! If we could lead students to focus on these two respects of writing material, their interests of writing will be aroused for everyone has at least something to say about what happened in their real life and themselves and what’s their reflective feeling about that, gradually, they will probably unveil the mysterious muffler of Writing itself! In this process, they’ll improve their ability of observing things and if they notice more they would like to notice much more, thus they would have more and more real material to write about! Everything in their observation by then will become much more interesting and fun! It will finally mean something to them and writing will become an essential part in their life! Moreover, if we could at the same time encourage them to try to write everyday just informally regardless of all the forms and conventions and everything else which would always distract their attention on writing itself, it will for sure speed up their progress in writing!--Practice Makes Perfect!

If we could continue to stick on this pedagogy, I believe it would eventually turn out to be pretty efficient and fruitful for teaching writing!!! Both teachers and students will benefit a lot!!!