Post 246: Does fear of taking a risk cause students to experience Writer's Block?

Post 246: Does fear of taking a risk cause Writer's Block?

According to Irene Clark's Concepts in Composition, one of the reasons students have writer's block is because they fear taking a risk.

Many students grew up with writing teachers who only mentioned student errors in a composition. As a result, students think they are bad writers so they are afraid of taking the risk of being called a bad writer if they write in class, hence the writer's block. Perhaps, the fear of writing is rooted in our insecurity that we are a bad writer or we are afraid that we will get a low grade if we write. Or we are convinced people will laugh at what we write.

In order to get students to overcome their fear of writer's block and get over their insecurity, you need to be a supportive teacher that does not focus on student writing errors.

You have to get students to forget about the trauma they suffered as kids when their writing teacher harped endlessly about their writing errors.

I like to encourage my students to write creatively or freewrite where they just write down their thoughts without thinking about grammar. Free-writing allows you to release your mind from the constricting thoughts of what Krashen calls, "The Affective Filter" and allows you to think freely about whatever subject you want.

My students tell me that free writing or stream of consciousness writing is their favorite part of the writing process because then they are free to be the most creative and not have to worry about essay structure or grammar.

Freewriting helps many students overcome writer's block and it helps students overcome the panic of seeing a blank page every day.

I too experience writer's block every day when I first sit down to write my blog because i see all these blank pages in front of me that have nothing on them that I must fill with useful information for teachers so I panic and think, "What will I write today in my blog?". Then I look into my 'idea' notebook which I had freewritten the night before and I am able to generate ideas for my blog.

I keep an idea notebook of interesting ideas that come to my head while I am doing ordinary chores so that when I sit down to write that block and that blank page confronts me, I find I have plenty to say. It is all about letting your ideas freely flow from your mind to your fingertips, for me, that is my way of overcoming writer's block every day. 

Irene Clark in her book, Concepts in Composition, advises students to write journals, now the journal is not a diary of your daily events, but instead a place where you write down ideas or a place where you respond to readings. When I read about something interesting, I write it down in my journal. You can have your students keep an idea journal so for future assignments in any class they take, they will have ideas on which to write an academic essay based on what they are interested in.

Do you keep an 'idea' notebook? How do you generate ideas for your 'idea' notebook? Do you read interesting articles? What do you do to generate ideas for your essays?