Good authors immerse themselves in creativity, not just skills

Lesmina Sari , Bogor | Sat, 10/11/2008 11:26 AM | Opinion

In his article, which appeared in this newspaper on Aug. 23, Setiono Sugiharto wrote, "Writing competence can only be acquired via reading. It seems then that the best and the only way of accelerating students' writing competencies to get students hooked on books and to make them fly to books, just as an opium smoker flies to his pipe."

Having been involved in teaching and education for many years and having struggled to find out what the best teaching strategies are, including the best strategy for teaching writing, led me to question his conclusion.

There's no doubt how important reading is. Reading gives us so many advantages, whether they're as simple as widening our horizons, teaching us new words, expanding our imaginations or helping us to master language development, or as complex as increasing our potential for academic success or indeed for lifelong success in general.

All three systems of language -- graphophonemics, syntax and semantics -- work together when we read. It's generally agreed by people all around the world about how important and significant reading is for us.

Great writers of the past learned their craft from reading the works of others, according to Aiden Warlow in his book Reason for Writing. But it takes more than just reading to create a writer. There are different reasons to write: To record personal experiences, thoughts and feelings, to communicate, to entertain. To be a writer, especially a good one, involves not only technical writing skills but also originality; it needs to meet the expectations of the reader -- a sense of audience, the lead, the end and strong characters and settings.

The first of the famous Harry Potter books was immensely popular, rated by The Mail as "the most imaginative debut since Roald Dahl"; this view was echoed by the Sunday Times, which said "comparisons to Dahl are, this time, justified", while The Guardian called it "a richly textured novel given lift-off by an inventive wit" and The Scotsman said it had "all the makings of a classic". These reviews showed that to be a good writer/author takes more than just writing competence. It involves the richness of the story, inventive wit and imagination.

Educators use different terms for teaching writing, such as process writing, writing skills and writing craft. Process writing has supposedly been long used in English as a Second Language courses.

Teaching writing skills/strategies has been an important part of almost every school curriculum around the world. Some schools call their language program "Language Arts", which involves writing. Writing is an integral part of the whole school curriculum.

Some schools in Jakarta have started to integrate writing lessons into their curriculum, some calling these Bengkel Menulis (Writing Workshop). There are also countless reasons for the importance of writing. One of these is that learning through writing -- the very process of writing -- will itself extend children's understanding of themselves, their world and their language.

Writing is a powerful way to learn. The aim in teaching writing is to help students become better writers and better learners. Through writing, students can reflect on experience, re-order their ideas to create new knowledge and find relationships between the known and the new. The reason for writing is the worthwhileness of the written task: Not just nice handwriting and correctly formed sentences but also putting careful thought into content.

The role of teacher is significant for teaching writing skills to our students. Nancy Atwell, one of the masters in teaching writing for junior high school students, in her book said that writing can be taught and learned. Her strategy is to ask the students to identify a course of study of writing that allowed them to write well -- not isolated recipes, but advice, models and activities that worked for them as writers in the specific context of writing.

"The final big question -- whether it's possible to teach someone how to write well -- these days strikes me as particularly irrelevant and pessimistic," she wrote.

Writing skills are learned by osmosis. The teacher's task is of vital importance. She must guide, advise, encourage, evaluate -- and she must teach.

However, Atwell she realizes that the final fabulous piece of writing, the end product, is inevitably the result of way too many variables -- conferences with the teacher, friends, the significance of the topic, the writer's strong intention, the pull of the potential audience, the child's previous experiences as a writer and reader, and many, many mini lessons -- to give credit to any one recipe for successful writing.

The role of the teacher is not just to give the students a copy of a worksheet torn from a book and ask them to work without the teacher herself knowing how to teach writing. In a regular classroom, the teacher plans and teaches a series of lessons, sometimes called mini-lessons, to teach the fundamental requirements in writing. The teacher must have a deep understanding about how to teach writing.

Teaching writing involves teacher conferences, peer conferences, mini-lessons and demonstrations. It also involves a predictable structure, regular time, the right atmosphere and publication.

The requirements are different for different kinds of writing although there's a common principle that is applied for all kinds of writing. Those principles that are applicable to different kinds of writing are things such as good titles; whether the reader can see it, hear it, feel it; good leads. Then there are more specific things that are need to be taught for writing fiction, such as ways to develop character, structure of a story and considerations in creating a character.

The writer is a teacher at The International School of Bogor (ISB). She can be reached at lesmina@bogor.isbogor.org

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