Grading Writing

In Elbow he mentioned that not every writing assignment has to be graded and Routman pointed out that like reading, becoming a good writer takes practice. I think these two ideas go hand-in-hand. Grading everything students ever write is not only time consuming for the teacher, but also sends a message to the students that they need approval.

I think that writing workshop (or something similar) is a great way to integrate writing time into the classroom. I feel that writing is usually done in spurts and are usually fairly substantial assignments. Writing every day is the only way that students will become better writers. This also means that students need to be free to write about whatever they want. That's not to say that there can still be assignments where students write about specific things (something has to be graded to show their progress!) Giving students that time every day just to write is necessary. It also means that teachers would have an overwhelmingly huge amount of grading to do, therefore, don't grade every piece of writing!