How to Be A Good, Even Great, Writing Instructor

Let me tell you about how you get to be a good, writing instructor, even a great one. Being one doesn’t come easily, at least for most folk. Sometimes a student just gets lucky and get the best one possible. My class did.

I observed our writing instructor, pondering what made her able to take us where she found us and deliver us down the writing path, more capable than we were when we arrived. If you asked me what you could do to become a better writing instructor, based on this experience with this instructor (and encountering a few others), here is what I would say.

1. Write. Write, then write some more. Just when you think you can’t write any more, do another line, another page. Yes, you the wannabe instructor. Write about topics you love. Write about topics you hate. Write about what you do not understand. It might help you to understand. Your students will want to know that you have real experience.

2. Experience life. M. Scott Peck’s first sentence in a book said “Life is difficult”. If your life has been as perfect as you wanted, likely you are either out of touch with reality or are one in a billion. Life gives plenty to write about and to appreciate what others write.

3. Love rejection. Love it as only a used car salesman can. It is unlikely that every feedback you give to your students will be accepted enthusiastically.

4. Court restatement. Learn to go beyond flirting with restatement but court it. You may need to find multiple ways to help your fledgling student improve the work under discussion.

5. Show your students how the planet is short on clean water, fresh air, soulful people but it has a ready unused comma supply.

6. Keep on writing. Yes, your own work. It will maintain and increase your empathy, especially as you receive critiques of your scribbles.

7. Read. Read what you love, what you hate. Read the classics and read what your thirteen year old nephew is reading. Examine the flow, the sentence structure, the dialogue. Question what has not been said that might have been. Your students will be following your example.

8. Connect with other writers. Question other writing instructors. How do they challenge their students, tolerate their foibles, move them to the next level?

9. Tune your ears. You will hear millions and millions of sentences. Some will bring tears while others will revile you. Giving feedback means both listening and hearing. You may hear them but how will they know you were listening to what they were trying to say?

10.Strengthen your memory. How will you remember the feedback you want to give? Keep a notepad (hard copy or electronic) next to you or your fingers on the keyboard you as you listen so you can pinpoint accurately those spots where improvements might be made.

11.Remember your role in the teacher-student interaction. It is not your job to rewrite their piece. Not your assignment to edit it either. Your job to give the student guidance, to point them in the right direction. They have to follow it with their own initiative and production.

12.Love your students, even with tough love at times. You are their instructor, not their friend. You acknowledge the strong dialogue, the clever sentence structure, the word melodies but most of all, you show your love of what they have done and who they are by your attention, your verbal and non-spoken enthusiasm. You become inquisitive about the lives they are sharing, the content they want to world the read. You learn as you teach.

13.Challenge them. Assign them a haiku, even a haibun, or other writing style unknown to them. Maybe write with them.

14.Accept that sometimes you will feel you deserve better than the student abilities you have been given. Recall they are looking to you to make them better than they are now. Know that you can do it.

You may get lucky and get a great group of students. Luck happens. Years ago I and my classmates won the writing instructor lottery and we continue to revel in our gratitude.