Teaching Writing Creatively

Teaching Writing Creatively represents a challenge to conventional notions of genre. It seeks to break down the artificial, antiquated barriers between "creative" and "academic" writing, making the writing classroom experience a more imaginative one. Teaching Writing Creatively features many of the most respected names in composition-instructors with long, successful histories of providing teachers with functional yet inventive methods of teaching writing. The collection begins with articles that assert that all good writing must be, in some important sense, "creative." These contributors offer accounts of the transformation of their composition classrooms; essays that demonstrate that good student writing is only marginally about genre; and a critique of the creative writing workshop as a model for the composition class. Part II offers a variety of ways to approach the teaching of writing as a creative endeavor. It includes articles on helping students better understand their own writing processes and suggestions on alternative composing strategies and their classroom applications. The contributors to the final section offer a variety of new approaches to creative writing that can be successfully applied to expository writing courses as well. Student-centered and process-oriented, Teaching Writing Creatively is a book writing instructors will find immediately useful-particularly composition instructors who feel hemmed in by the conventional expectations of writing courses and creative writing instructors looking to take advantage of the latest innovations in composition studies.