ABSTRACT
To learn to write, students must write. The question is, what kind of writing should they do in order to develop the underlying skill that will make all forms of writing more possible? Stories require plot design and are often written episodically. Essays are expository and are complicated exercises in thinking. What is the foundation of writing for communication and pleasure? If students don’t see writing as a way to communicate and/or as a source of pleasure, they will not do it unless forced and then not well. It may be that one good way to learn the underlying craft of writing is to do scene writing, as in the following example by a fourth-grade child:
Everyone was asleep. Everyone, that is, but the cat. The cat looked temptedly at the sleeping magpie. Then he started the journey up to the cage. Up the cupboard shelf. Soon the cat was at the top. He leaped forward into the air toward the dangling cage. He caught onto the cage. The magpie looked terrified. So did the wise old woman. The old woman tried to drag the cat off the magpie’s cage. But no, the cat had tried days, for weeks and even months, and now he would not let go.
77This recreated scene from The Tower by the Sea is one of hundreds written by elementary students from memory. Their assignment was to relive the scene in their minds and make it come to life either as a character within the scene or as an observer. They were not to describe it; rather they were to experience it and bring it to life in writing. This process is aided when the teacher reads scenes from literature aloud dramatically as models. Students are encouraged later to bring scenes from their own life to their writing. The results of personal experience writing and writing from pictures and memory will be obvious in the fluency with which they write stories and expositions.