How to teach writing

Really, that should be a question. How to teach writing?

I just spent the bulk of this week at a training workshop for high school English teachers who will be teaching pre-AP (Advanced Placement) classes. Aside from understanding and decoding literature, writing is at the heart of AP curriculum. So that question – how do we best teach writing? – was at the heart of most of our discussions.

I also spoke about writing and storytelling to a group of college journalists who have started their own online/print publication. Again, the central question was: how to teach writing?

There are untold numbers of strategies and techniques and theories. Education texts and teacher training sessions abound with acronyms and methods designed to help students grasp the fundamentals of sentence structure and phrase construction. “Brush Strokes.”  “Voice Lessons.” The five-paragraph essay.  The rule of threes. Etc. Etc.

Each approach has it merits. Each lesson emphasizes the basics of good writing. Use powerful verbs. Be specific and detailed. Show, don’t tell. Vary sentence and paragraph structure and length. Listen to the rhythm of your words. 

But, there’s more to writing than just the mechanics. It’s not enough to just know how to identify appositive phrases or how to correctly parse a compound-complex sentence.

At its core, writing is about soul. It’s the music of our hearts, the alchemy of our feelings, the reflection of our experience. It’s our scars and triumphs made tangible, our hidden yearning made visible, our secret tragedies made public.

The act of writing is painful as well as exhilarating, magical as well as impenetrable, a solitary pursuit as well as a rite of communion with the world.

How do you teach that?