Quotes About Writing

National Writing Project sites: "Students need to read like writers and they need to write like readers.

How do we get students to understand that the hard work and frustration that comes with learning how to write well is worth it? How do we get students to see the importance writing can play in their adult lives? How do we change the fact that seven out of ten students are leaving high school without adequate writing skills?

What does it matter if teachers sprint through all the standards if at the end of the year their students still cannot write well?

If I want my students to work toward becoming real-world writers, I need to shift the focus of my writing instruction toward real-world writing purposes.

When students are taught to approach argument through inquiry, good things happen: they choose topics worthy of arguing, they gain ownership (through choice) of their writing, and their teacher is not stuck in Groundhog Day reading the same argument paper over and over. Key

In the real world, writing is not artificially separated into specific discourses. It is blended for effect.

the teacher should model by writing—and think out loud while writing—in front of the class.

I don't tell them how to draft their papers; I show them how I draft my papers.

As much as possible, I am trying to create agency in my young writers. Students who have acquired agency don't need the teacher to assign them a prompt; they are young writers who are able to independently generate writing from self-initiated ideas. They revel in choice—the very choice I am afraid will disappear in classrooms operating under the testing pressures generated by the Common Core writing standards. One

Teach your students real-world writing purposes, add a teacher who models his or her struggles with the writing process, throw in lots of real-world mentor texts for students to emulate, and give our kids the time necessary to enable them to stretch as writers.

writing can be used as a vehicle to express ourselves as we negotiate the journey through our lives.

Writing has become foundational to finding meaningful employment across much of the workforce.

When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 a.m. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for abandoned couches, which he wrestles into the back of his pickup truck. Then he writes for the rest of the day.

Words are what I have and it's the words as words that interest me.

Ya writin' a book? Hey great. Need some help? Want some of my quips? Hey, we could do it together. We'd quip 'em to death. Give 'em quiplash hee hee hee.

One of the hardest things for me, now that I'm famous, is finding people who can read my stuff and give me an honest critique.

Writing a song is much like being an author. Yes, we all have tools to write (everyone has a brain I hope!), but that doesn't all of a sudden make us best selling authors.

Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.

English is so past,' she said. 'Sure, we need people who can write about what we do, but they don't have to be English graduates. Theology graduates who don't believe any of it – that would be useful.

I write thrillers for the same reason that people read them – it's escapism.

Producing works of art doesn't often count as appropriate intellectual work in an arts department: yet the equivalent in a science department, doing physics or chemistry, does. So why is it that in universities writing about novels is thought to be a higher intellectual calling than writing novels; or rather, if writing novels is not thought to be intellectually valid, why is writing about them?

If all you had was academic ability, you wouldn't have been able to get out of bed this morning. In fact, there wouldn't have been a bad to get out of. No one could have made one. You could have written about possibility of one, but not have constructed it.

I sometimes think if I did not write I would be a madwoman. Now I am a sane woman with a lot of mad pages.

Writing must have an element of magic to it. When that magic takes over, the writer himself loses track of time during the writing—and the reader will lose track of time during the reading. If you're happy at work and think of it as your own private briar patch—a place of escape from the world in which time is your time—the clock of life becomes your clock, and even the thorns in that briar patch are of your own choosing.