Constantly Writing

Boice mentions the idea of constantly writing and using this to avoid burning out or overdoing things. This method is useful for decreasing stress in a project. It seems that this is a good notion to get into our students heads for their own writing projects. I have tried to do this to some extent, but I think there is more I could do.

So if they have a particular essay coming up, assigning certain steps to force them to work on it a bit at a time is a good way to prevent them from stressing out and trying to rush it all together. Many of us do this through requiring drafts, but I have been thinking that there are other ways as well. I do usually require a few informal, one-page essays from my students. Usually these fulfill some part of the project, as a free-writing exercise. But I think the more we can get our students to be constantly working, the better.

The trouble is making these tasks actually useful rather than merely busy work. I have tried to think of other ways that I could incorporate more writing into my class, but I need to know that it is going to be purposeful. I don't want my students resenting tasks that they feel are merely getting in the way of working on their larger papers. I thought of having students write short informal papers on certain concepts in the book, for example. There are reflection-type essays. But these don't seem to be as directly related in a way I would like. And I seem to be already having them do as much prewriting as seems feasible. So I'm just not sure. To break it into even more drafts might be optimal from their perspective, but I simply do not have time to go through a bunch of drafts on each paper.