Kathleen, author of the Howard Gardner- and Deborah Meier-touted Fires in the Mind, kindly writes a reflection on my previous post. If you’re new to the profession or simply looking for a way to align your work more completely with what kids really think and need, _Fires_ continues to be a great place to start.

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Licking the Envelope

Dina Strasser reminds us in a wonderful post on The Line this week of the power of making students send out their written work to an audience other than their teacher. I couldn’t agree more.

Sending out work brings young writers immediately into the community of developing experts. Anyone who’s done it—and I’ve done it by now 637,243 times—knows the thrill of combined dread and excitement that goes with exposing your work to the eyes of “real readers.”

What do I dread when I do it myself? That they’ll be bored. The ideas will seem stale. The language will be overblown or jargony. The same adjective (for me it’s always “powerful”) will appear three times without my having noticed it. Some horribly embarrassing mechanical error (like “pubic education”) will slip in.

The adolescent fear of humiliation sticks with us writers for a lifetime. Yet all of us write, in large part, to be heard. And so we practice the habits used by “real writers”—that is, writers with a genuine audience.

We pass those habits along to each other in the ways that craft has always been passed down. Like a secret handshake letting me into a club, older, wiser writers gave me theirs, starting when I was only a teenager myself. Now I pass them on to the students that I work with—and as long as I maintain credibility by doing it myself, they take me seriously. (That’s why it’s so important for teachers of writing to actually write and share their work.)

I’ll list a few of my “expert habits” here, just to illustrate:

–Get over the fear of writing something dumb. The great writer John McPhee taught me this trick: Write “Dear Mom” at the top of the piece, then just start telling her what you’re thinking. Your mother (or your grandmother, or whoever stands in) will be thrilled to hear from you, no matter what you say. Then, once you have your words on paper, you can go back and cut out the dumb parts.

–Always read what you write out loud. Every time you change it, read it aloud again. Your ear will tell you what your eye has missed.

–Let it cool. Don’t show it to anyone until you’ve let it sit for a day or so. You’ll hear it differently with even a few hours of perspective.

–Give it to a first reader you trust. It’s the equivalent of asking “Does this outfit look good on me?” Before you go out in public, you really want to know what they think, even if it stings a little.

–Revise repeatedly. But know when to stop! Getting it read is more important than getting it absolutely perfect. (And there’s no such thing anyway.)

–When you’re ready to send out the work, proofread one last time. Read every word of every line, including headline and footnotes! If you’re sending it with a letter, proofread the letter, too.

~KC

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I’ll bet at least 80% of my ELA teacher readers have used, distributed, or have on the walls of their classrooms some type of graphic called “The Writing Process.” I’m thinking of creating one that has  “Go back later to cut out the dumb parts” somewhere on it.