what is a writer?" (I must admit I didn't come up with this brilliant idea, but adapted it from a suggestion from another instructor.) Students would always come up with different ideas about what that meant, but more often than not they never talked about themselves as writers. They thought of published authors as writers. They thought of people who sat in a sunlit room all day with a stack of white pages (or in front of a computer) as writers. They thought of people who were paid to write as writers. My students often did not think of themselves, or their instructors, as writers.
Jenny Gilbert on 17 Feb 11Writing Fix (online resource) Here's an interesting free resource for anyone involved in teaching or learning writing skills. This site has been put together by the writers, teachers and students of the Northern Nevada Writing Project to support the development of writing skills with the Six Trait Model. The site hosts an extensive collection of lessons, activities and other resources. (The Writing Fix is one of 190 web sites sponsored by the National Writing Project in the US.) Featured prominently at the Writing Fix are two separate "prompt generators". One is called the "Interactive Instant Plot Creator". You press separate buttons to bring up random suggestions for setting, character, and conflict. To go along with this idea generator, there is a downloadable "pre-writing worksheet" as well as a "rough draft worksheet". The other generator is called the "Random Prompt Generator for Writers". This second prompt generator consists of 470 prompts, each of which begins with a question that is followed by a suggested writing task.
