How can literature be used to enhance student writing

New Directions in Teaching and Learning, no. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Bright Idea Network , Require Students to Do Extensive Writing. A, A Teaching writing is not only the job of the English department alone. Writing is an essential tool for learning a discipline and helping students improve their writing skills is a responsibility for all faculty. Let students know that you value good writing.

Stress the importance of clear, thoughtful writing. Faculty who tell students that good writing will be rewarded and poor writing will be penalized receive better essays than instructors who don't make such demands. In the syllabus, on the first day, and throughout the term, remind students that they must make their best effort in expressing themselves on paper. Back up your statements with comments on early assignments that show you really mean it, and your students will respond.

Regularly assign brief writing exercises in your classes. To vary the pace of a lecture course, ask students to write a few minutes during class.

Some mixture of in-class writing, outside writing assignments, and exams with open-ended questions will give students the practice they need to improve their skills.

Provide guidance throughout the writing process. After you have made the assignment, discuss the value of outlines and notes, explain how to select and narrow a topic, and critique the first draft, define plagiarism as well.

Don't feel as though you have to read and grade every piece of your students' writing. Ask students to analyze each other's work during class, or ask them to critique their work in small groups.

Students will learn that they are writing in order to think more clearly, not obtain a grade. Keep in mind, you can collect students' papers and skim their work. Find other faculty members who are trying to use writing more effectively in their courses. Pool ideas about ways in which writing can help students learn more about the subject matter. See if there is sufficient interest in your discipline to warrant drawing up guidelines.

Students welcome handouts that give them specific instructions on how to write papers for a particular course or in a particular subject area. Tell students that writing is a way of learning, not an end in itself. Also let them know that writing is a complicated, messy, nonlinear process filled with false starts.

Help them to identify the writer's key activities: Developing ideas Finding a focus and a thesis Composing a draft Getting feedback and comments from others Revising the draft by expanding ideas, clarifying meaning, reorganizing Editing Presenting the finished work to readers Explain that writing is hard work. Share with your class your own struggles in grappling with difficult topics. If they know that writing takes effort, they won't be discouraged by their own pace or progress.

One faculty member shared with students their notebook that contained the chronology of one of his published articles: first ideas, successive drafts, submitted manuscript, reviewers' suggested changes, revised version, galley proofs, and published article. Give students opportunities to talk about their writing.

Students need to talk about papers in progress so that they can formulate their thoughts, generate ideas, and focus their topics. Take five or ten minutes of class time for students to read their writing to each other in small groups or pairs.

It's important for students to hear what their peers have written. Encourage students to revise their work. Provide formal steps for revision by asking students to submit first drafts of papers for your review or for peer critique.

You can also give your students the option of revising and rewriting one assignment during the semester for a higher grade. Faculty report that 10 to 40 percent of the students take advantage of this option. Explain thesis statements. A thesis statement makes an assertion about some issue. A common student problem is to write papers that present overviews of facts with no thesis statement or that have a diffuse thesis statement.

Stress clarity and specificity. The more the abstract and difficult the topic, the more concrete the student's language should be. Inflated language and academic jargon camouflage rather than clarify their point. Explain the importance of grammar and sentence structure, as well as content. Students shouldn't think that English teachers are the only judges of grammar and style. Tell your students that you will be looking at both quality of their writing and the content.

Distribute bibliographies and tip sheets on good writing practices. Check with your English department or writing center to identify materials that can be easily distributed to students. Consider giving your students a bibliography of writing guides, for example: Crews, F.

Techniques for eliminating bureaucratese and restoring energy to tired prose. New York: HarperCollins, , Science and Engineering Barrass, R. What you might read for fun and what you might read in when studying literature can be quite different. The formal study of literature teaches us about how literature has changed and evolved over time, and why authors in each period adopted particular techniques.

For instance, the ponderous description used by many Victorian authors was often motivated by being paid by the word, with characters repeatedly re-introduced because the story might have been serialised over weeks or months, so that all but the keenest readers might have forgotten an early character by the time the story reached its end. More often, it leads to you having more interesting ideas of your own. TV Tropes has a whole page of these kind of examples for works of literature.

None of these lack originality despite wearing their influences on their sleeve. Instead, they benefit from the traditions that they draw on, whether those of the traditions of boarding school novels, of dystopian fiction, or of tongue-in-cheek zombie fiction. Reading more widely and studying literature can help spark similar ideas in you. I hope I never write anything like that. But these ideas seldom surviving reading classics of literature, and almost never survive actually studying them.

In other words, all of these great writers were human beings dealing with the difficulty of pleasing their audiences and keeping a roof over their heads just like modern writers do. Taking the time to step away from obsessing over your own work to enjoy the work of others can make all the difference in reminding you why the world of literature was something you chose to embrace in the first place.

One of the most common literary devices, metaphors are used across essays, books, songs, poems and speeches. They are used to compare two completely unrelated objects. The idea is to provide a stronger description such that the reader interprets it better. Here, Shakespeare is comparing the world to the stage and implying how we are all actors, enacting different scenes.

Similes and metaphors are not the same. Using similes makes writing more interesting and descriptive. Coming up with new similes gets you to push your creative boundaries.

Unlike metaphors and similes, symbolism is a more subtle form of comparison. Using symbolism is almost like making your writing poetic. Instead of explicitly stating the obvious, you can use symbolism to let readers interpret it on their own and think deeper.

They also refer to using words that begin with the same letter. Alliterations are generally used to draw attention and make something pleasurable to read. You can also use alliteration to name a character or place. So, what does irony mean? It is used to highlight situations wherein something is very different from what it seems to be.

Irony can be used to inject humor or to add a profound meaning. Situational irony is when the outcome of a situation is very different from what was expected. Hyperboles are when you use words or phrases to make something grander or give it a larger-than-life effect. Sometimes exaggerating or using hyperbole is an effective way to convey the message in an intense manner or lay emphasis on a particular situation.

They are purely used for effect and are not meant to be taken literally. I did not know what in the world to do. I was quaking from head to foot, and could have hung my hat on my eyes, they stuck out so far. The writer only uses this sentence to emphasize on how helpless he was - in reality, his eyes were not sticking out. Personification is when you give human characteristics and feelings to inanimate objects, animals or nature. It gives your writing a more dramatic effect and lets your readers relate more easily to the situation or object in question.