Living Life Twice

Volition is the need, desire, urge or the internal compulsion to write.’ Ross Young and Felicity Ferguson Writing For Pleasure The growth of volition is fed by a growing knowledge about writing, informing the writer that what they are doing is both pleasurable and desirable. Volition can also be achieved through writing something so strongly and clearly that it energizes the writer and they persist in the hope of replicating the original sense of accomplishment.   As teachers we are charged with responsibility to assist young writers to learn how to write. Equally we must work to instil within them a desire to want to write. We must assist them to develop a mindset that the benefits that flow from writing outweigh the time and effort they invest in producing those words.   As teachers we must convince young writers of the intellectual, social and personal rewards that can be derived from writing. The pay off must be enticing to the writer. If we are to be effec...

  Some of my earliest memories of writing are entwined around the weekly writing topics I was given in primary school. We wrote every Thursday afternoon, immediately after the lunch break. It wasn't even called writing. Our teacher referred to it as 'composition time.' We wrote for about twenty minutes in absolute silence in our 'composition' books.  At the end of the allotted time, we handed in our written responses, then waited an entire week to receive feedback for our labored efforts. It consisted of a mark out of ten and a page of red ink comments and slashes across the page. Then we sat and waited for the next teacher topic to be thrown our way. We wrote one day a week for twenty minutes. It wasn't much of a writing program by today's standards. It wasn't much of a way to learn writing back then either. I'm surprised we learned to write at all on such a starvation diet. I was just lucky enough to be the kind of kid who was driven to write in pl...