When I was in Arizona, I used to teach an online class in personal writing. I really loved teaching that class, and sometimes I feel like I’ve lost a part of me by not teaching it anymore. It took me awhile to warm up to teaching the class as I always felt conflicted about “grading” students’ personal writing. I resolved that dilemma by changing the way I grade. I’m no Peter Elbow, and I’m not really a very touchy-feely kind of teacher, but that class really helped me remember why I teach…and why I write. It’s really the only class I’ve ever taught where I would genuinely and faithfully write with my students.
At the beginning of the semester, I would share four “rules of writing” with the class that I had adapted from rules Lynn Nelson shared in a workshop I took with him a few years back. I owe much of what I discovered about the power of personal writing to Lynn, and I thought I would share those four rules here to inspire myself to write again.
1. Write from the heart.
The best writing we do is about things that we care about and are invested in. We’ve all had to do writing that was assigned to us, that we weren’t interested in, and that we had to complete anyhow. The best writing, however, starts with the heart, and explores things that we care about. I’m constantly struggling with how to help my students follow this rule in class, and it all comes back to writing about what we love and connecting our own interests to our learning.
2. Write small.
This doesn’t mean that handwriting should be small. 
When you write, stay focused–work on concentrating on small details. Don’t try to tackle huge topics or entire life experiences in one short piece. Instead, focus on a specific moment in that experience and help your reader to really feel it. The more you focus on small details and moments in your writing, the more your reader will be able to experience what you are writing about as he or she reads. (As I write, I’m realizing that’s a problem with my blogging–I need to learn to focus on small details, realizing that there’s always another blog post…)
3. Write before you write.
In other words, do some drafting. Write in a journal. Work through some different ideas before committing to a piece of writing that will be shared publicly. It’s okay to go through a few revisions before sharing something with others–in fact, it’s preferable.
4. Honor your own authority as a writer.
The final rule is, I think, the most important. You are the final authority on anything you write. We need to recognize our own voice in our writing and take ownership of it. Commenting on and receiving feedback on writing is an important step. The author, however, has to read through the responses received and decide which direction to follow. Sometimes conflicting feedback from different sources makes that difficult, but ultimately your writing is yours.
The challenge I see for myself is figuring out how to incorporate what I find important and inspiring about writing into what I teach in classes that are very different in focus than my old personal writing class. Can you really follow all of these rules in a class that is focused exclusively on academic writing–especially 1 and 4?
