Write What You Want To Know

It would appear that the writers of two of our textbooks are at odds with each other regarding writing assignments. One, James Williams, asserts that students should not merely "write what they know", since they haven't lived long enough to to have interesting stories to tell. But Vicki Spandel, author of The 9 Rights of Every Writer, devotes an entire chapter as to why students should pick topics that are important to them: "Writers who discover their own topics write with voice and commitment."

Essentially, Williams's argument is that students need to learn skills such as argumentation, so teachers need to give very detailed writing assignments with a functional purpose. Spandel, on the other hand, is more concerned with fostering students' creativity and passion. Who's right here, in my opinion? Honestly, they both are.

The first thing to realize is that Spandel isn't saying that students should "write what they [already] know," i.e. themselves. She's saying that students should write about what interests them, what they want to learn more about. Meanwhile, Williams is right that students need to learn specific writing skills for different situations. However, I feel that his examples of good writing assignments are pretty narrow. Also, his statement that young people don't have anything interesting to say is both incorrect and unbelievably condescending for many reasons, not the least of which is the assumption that everyone under a certain age has the same life experiences and thinks the same way as everyone else his or her age.

There's a way to strike a balance between these two ideas, to give students structure in order to make sure they're learning what they need to be, while still allowing them the freedom to write about what they want to. In my college Expository Writing class, our professor gave us a series of essay assignments to write - Personal Narrative, Alternative Voice, Metaphorical Application of a Concept, Culture Criticism - but didn't dictate to us what our topics would be. I did the best non-fiction writing I've ever done for that class. Similarly, in some of my college literature classes, we were allowed to write about whatever aspect of a studied text we wanted to. This not only forced us to come up with our own thesis (instead of being handed one), we had to really think about what aspect of the literature intrigued us. Even if the text was awful (let's say, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance), you had to find something about it worthwhile enough to write for several pages about - a character, a theme, a symbol, anything (Hollingsworth as Jim Jones/David Khoresh, sexual politics, the narrator as a cipher, the struggles of power in a supposedly egalitarian setting, what have you).

Many teachers probably believe that high schoolers can't handle that kind of choice, and I'll admit that it will take a 10th-grader a lot more time and thought to come up with her own topic than it would a senior English Lit major. One of the teachers I did my original observations for gave his 9th-graders a seemingly simple essay assignment: Write about your passion. For some of them, this was something they hadn't ever thought about before, and they had no idea where to start ("I don't have a passion," or "I don't even know what mine is."). But that's precisely why these assignments are so important, because they force the student to think and make choices for himself instead of having his hand held by the teacher until he reaches his predetermined destination. Yes, the skills are important, but freedom of choice gives students the motivation to do their best writing.

Related link: The Essay Writing Center. Although intended for college writers, this site has many useful tips for writing all kinds of different essays, from Argumentative to Scholarship. The linked page offers help in choosing topics for writing, which should be helpful for just about any writer.