Today I am going to talk to you about writing.  There are many do’s and don’ts in writing.  For example many teachers would say don’t start an essay the way I started this essay, but these do’s and don’ts can be looked at from many different perspectives.  I believe that they can restrict a writer from fulfilling or exceeding their artistic potential.

Not to sound too fractious, but the way that writing is presented in the school system is usually not so valuable.  Right away students are taught how to write sentence by sentence and told what ideas to convey within each sentence.  This strips the student of any expression and neglects the idea that students are all unique with different ideas and thoughts and each have brains that work differently.  I understand that students must have prompts given to them sometimes, but good writing is not an essay just like everyone else’s’.  What I have learned is that the best writing comes from good structure.  This means that students must learn how to organize their ideas in the best possible way to portray their story.  This does not mean that every single student should have a topic sentence here that contains this information, followed by a supportive quote, and then use these phrases to begin explaining why. That is just foolish.  It doesn’t give a person any room to express their own thoughts and unique ideas.  A student should be allowed to use their own voice and put their ideas in an order that they think is best because after all, they are their ideas! These ideas came from the students’ brains and if they thought of them then why should they be expected to manipulate their own knowledge into a way that will satisfy others ideas of perfection. What baffles me the most is that people can demand that everything be a certain way and still expect every student to wow them.  We need to get away from the idea that there is only one way to do something correctly.  Chances are there is someone out there with exceptional writing potential and a new way of depicting information that doesn’t follow the current standards.  Why would we want to take that away from them and from the rest of the world?  Writing is a skill and one cannot impress it into someone’s brain.  They can teach the basis of writing, but writing well is a skill earned through exploration of one’s own imagination.  To teach someone exactly what to write is to take away any unique perception they may have.

To me, writing is (usually) fun because it is the one of the few times a student can truly show what they have learned and understand rather than proving you know how to memorize information.  All in all, writing is about conveying an idea in the best way possible and students should not have regulations to follow when writing.