The creator of The Adventures of Travel Penguin wrote an entry about his system of blogging. He is very organized, schedules posts ahead of time, has a topic assigned to each day, and he has posted every single day since 2016. Me, on the other hand, I'm not so organized. There are times when I write posts a few days ahead, other times the posts are in real time. This is a real time post. Travel Penguin's recent post "On Blogging," ( https://travelpenguin.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-saturday-morning-post-on-blogging.html )made me think about my teaching days and one of the strategies I used to get students to write and think about writing. This was back in the day when the students physically wrote in their writer's notebook.
The Process
If you don’t know what to write in your diary, you write the date at the top of the page as neatly and slowly as you can and things will come to you.
Get yourself comfortable, open the writer's notebook, and be ready to write for five minutes.
What you are going to do for the next five minutes is write as much as you possibly can. You’re not going to lift your pen or pencil from the page. If you hit a point where you don't know what to write, make curlycues until another thought comes to you. Keep your pen moving. Write whatever comes to mind. Don’t judge it. Don’t try to find the perfect words. Just write. Write your heart out. Soon you’ll find that you’re leaping from one idea to the next. Now that computers are in most students' hands, it would be interesting to see if typing a prompt on a computer would be as effective as writing on paper. There are so many benefits from the physical act of writing.
At the beginning of the school year, I gave the students prompts. As the 8th graders became more familiar and comfortable with the process, I would still offer a prompt or they could choose their own topic and go to town for five minutes writing whatever would come from their pens.
This morning I gave myself the five minute writing exercise. I chose the topic Philadelphia because of the Eagles/Chiefs Super Bowl game. My mind bounced around jotting down thoughts. They might turn into future blog posts.
Thanks for the mention. I wish I had - had a teacher like you before college. Over past decade I have pushed myself to improve my writing, and it starts with writing more, writing consistently, and as you advise, getting the first draft down no matter how good or bad, one source called it fast and dirty. Computers made a positive difference for me. My strangely wired brain struggles with spelling, and my handwriting is terrible, largely to cover up the spelling, computers with spell check have vastly improved my writing, and spelling.
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