Donald Graves: A Fresh Look at Writing – Choice

I first met my friend Donald Graves in 1992 when I attended the University of New Hampshire Writing Program. Donald has had a greater impact on my teaching than any other mentor. When I visit writing classes to see if they are successful I always use his chapter titled,“The Seven Conditions for Effective Writing, from his book, A Fresh Look at Writing, 1994,  to determine if that teacher is on the right track. Donald writes the following on the importance of “Choice” in the writing workshop:

Children need to learn how to choose their own topics when they write. When I began teaching, I wanted my students to have chal­lenging, morally uplifting topics, so I assigned them. I thought I knew what would engage students’ minds. How well I remember the moment every Friday when my seventh grade students returned from lunch. Behind the Denoyer-Geppert map of the Soviet Union I had written the topic of the week—something like “Should there be capital punishment?”— on the chalkboard. To make it more chal­lenging and increase the dramatic tension, I would suddenly release the catch on the map, which would roll up to reveal the topic for the week. My students had no chance to read, interview, or gather mater­ial, to do what professional writers do before writing. I invited poor writing, and, got it. I should have realized how confused my students were when one asked, “Does this mean we capitalize everything?”

Several years later I moved into what I call my “creative phase” in teaching writing. I still assigned topics, but this time they were intended to release the spontaneity of students’ minds. I had the stu­dents write on topics like “If I could fly,” “If I were an ice cream cone or a baseball glove,” “If this glove could talk, what would it say?” I thought the writing they produced was cute, artsy, imaginative. It wasn’t. It was gushing and nonspecific. Worse, it had little to do with what writing is for: to help students learn to think through the issues and concerns of their everyday lives.

When students write every day they don’t find it as difficult to choose topics. If a child knows she will write again tomorrow – her mind can go to work pondering her writing topic. Choosing a topic once a week is difficult. The moment for writing suddenly arrives, and the mind is caught unprepared.

 

 

How well I remember Amy, a fourth-grade youngster in our research project in Atkinson, New Hampshire. The researcher, Lucy Calkins, kept asking this remarkable young writer how she wrote but got little response. Finally, Amy announced that she knew how she wrote: “Last night I was sitting in bed wondering how I would start my fox piece. But I couldn’t come up with anything. My cat Sidney, sat on the bed next to me. I said, “Sidney, how am I going to start my fox piece?” but I still couldn’t come up with anything. Finally, at about 10:30, my sister came home and turned on the hall light. Now over my doorknob there is a round hole where you’d have a turnlock. When my sister turned on the hall light a beam of light came through the hole and struck Sidney in the face and Sidney went squint. Then I knew how I would start my fox piece.” The piece goes something like this: ‘There was a fox who lived in a den beneath a stump. At midday a beam of light came through a crack in the stump and caught the fox in the eyes and the fox went squint’. That’s how I knew I’d start my fox piece.”

Here is a child in a constant state of composition: she knew that tomorrow she would write (time) and that she could write about the fox (choice of topic). The time she devoted to pondering the best lead for her piece was time well spent

When children choose their own topics, I can expect more of their writing. “What did you set out to do here? Did you have an audience in mind for this?” From the beginning in our conference I can focus my questions on their initiative and their intentions. I am reminded of how important it is that a writer choose his own topic by Donald Murray’s recent workshop experience at a New Hampshire confer­ence. The workshop participants sent Murray out of the room while they chose a topic for him to write about When Murray returned they announced their decision: “Write about your favorite place in New Hampshire.” Murray began writing on the chalkboard: he wrote sev­eral leads, erased them, began again, made some notes, started again. Finally, he turned to the group and announced, “I can’t write this piece; I have no favorite place in New Hampshire.”

Murray could have produced a false choice or decided, although he had never thought about it before, on a favorite place in New Hampshire. But as a professional, he knew that dishonest writing is not good writing. How easy it is to teach our students to write dishon­estly to fulfill curriculum requirements. Indeed, a student’s entire diet from first grade through high school can be a series of one dishonest piece after another. Sadly, the student can even graduate without learning that writing is the medium through which our most intimate thoughts and feelings can be expressed.

Although students can choose a topic for most of their writing, they are expected to write. They must produce. Sometimes topic assignment is helpful and even necessary. Students do make bad choices and expe­rience writer’s block, or they need to shift to new topics after exhausting their usual few. When you show students how to “read the world” by writing with them, you also demonstrate how to deal with many of these issues. You may even find it useful to ask students to assign you a topic in order to show them how you work on assignments. -