Remember, a writer writes, always. 

“Remember,” Larry Donner tells his students, “a writer writes, always.” This is not a piece of sage advice from a great writing teacher or a famous writer. It is a line from Throw Momma from the Train (1987), and it is delivered by the film’s central protagonist, disgruntled novelist and community college writing instructor Larry Donner (Billy Crystal). Donner repeats this line as a mantra. Writers need to regularly write in order to be successful. In the context of the film, it is an ironic joke. Donner is bitter and depressed because his ex-wife stole his novel, published it, and has become a tremendous success. Donner also has “writer’s block” and hasn’t written a word in months. If “a writer writes, always,” then Donner is not a writer. 

The mantra is a crass joke that motivates the film’s plot, but there is a deceptively simple truth to the joke that underscores my teaching philosophy: Writers have to write to become better writers. Writers don’t become competent and effective if they don’t actually, regularly write and engage in meaningful workshops. While regular writing is not a recipe for improved writing, Donner’s mantra serves as an invitation to become a better writer because acts of writing are generative and lead to more writing. As an educator and teacher of writing, facilitating acts of regular, generative writing is a vital part of helping students improve as writers and communicators.

Writing is not just a skill. It is a way of thinking. Contrary to popular opinion, writing is not a static, learned practice. It is not like riding a bike or driving a car. It is a way of knowing, a way of thinking. Student writers benefit from instruction focused on the nurturing of their individual processes and the cultivation of realistic, on-going reflection and self-assessment. I help students come to recognize—and respect—the value of reflective and recursive thinking as pathways to powerful individual expression and effective communication.

But it’s not just what student writers have to say. It’s how they say it. All writers, but especially student writers, face an unnecessary—often contradictory—deluge of expectations. For most, navigating the rules and prescriptions of ‘formal’ composition can be frustrating and demoralizing. Students are often defeated before they even begin.

Don’t write like you talk.
Don’t use “I.”
Don’t end a sentence with a preposition.
Don’t plagiarize.
Have a clear thesis.
Make sure you cite properly.
Do this.
Don’t do that.

And by all means, never make an editing mistake or you will lose your bathroom privileges!!!  

Directives like these make it extremely difficult to think and write. My goal—as champion and coach—is to help students confidently cut through the chatter and trust that what they have to say matters and is worth saying. Together we look for more meaningful ways to identify and maneuver the norms of academic and public discourse. While it is important to help students understand the complex relationships between readers, writers, and communities, it’s really easy to let all that “stuff” get in the way of their material acts of writing—just like it’s hard to talk through constant interruptions. In my courses, then, I put my students’ contributions— what they have to say—first. We strike a balance between “listening” and “talking,” between learning and doing. Experience. Praxis. I dispense with writing textbooks that focus on prescriptive formulas and formulaic examples. Instead, I cycle between inward and outward inquiry. Together we contemplate who we are and what we value, and then we think about how we “fit” within the discourse communities we are expected to navigate as individuals and professionals. 

The rules of discourse only matter if we understand the means by which they limit how and what we can say—and how knowing the rules affords us opportunities to contribute to, shape, and change our communities. I help students to understand we can’t really value the academic and professional communities we seek to join and contribute to unless we know who we are, what we value—and why we’ve been called to our paths. My job as a writing instructor is to help students understand how their values shape them, how their values impact their communities, and how the discourse of professional communities is shaped by and through what community members collectively value.

Academic and professional chatter also has a tendency to shake writers’ confidence. And confidence is arguably the most vital part of doing writing. In my courses, we work on writing confidence through unrestricted production (free writing) and targeted, formative assessment (feedback). My students write weekly, even daily. They engage course readings and concepts in spaces free of my approval and in peer communities. We then mine their writing for formatively assessed genre assignments and projects. Through formative feedback, I emphasize transitions from ideas and hunches to focused compositions. My students regularly reflect on what they do and how they do it. They also look to see how their writing habits reveal patterns and room for future development.

As writers, we can’t simply “unplug” from technology. That’s okay because whether Walter Ong was right about the origins of orality and literacy, we know writing is not just assisted by technology, it is fundamentally technological. The act of writing—whether with pen, pencil, typewriter, keyboard, bloody finger, or quill—requires the use of tools, and tool use is technology use. Writers, then, must understand and make use of all available, technological means to write. This simple truth provides the basis from which I approach the networked classroom. Instructional technologies, along with devices, screens and keyboards, programs and artificial intelligences, serve as a dynamic infrastructure from which my pedagogy emerges and does its work. In the digitally imbricated spaces of my classrooms, my students and I embrace multimodality and collaboration. We do this not because it’s convenient (it can be), but because writing—as technê—requires it. Word processing, learning management systems, audio and video production tools, and GPTs are all part of acts of composing, and they all transfer from and talk back to the ideas we wish to express and communicate. Our use of tools and networked spaces, however, must not happen without a critical eye toward their constraints. I challenge students to test the biases and rhetorical boundaries of our ever-evolving digital technologies, to develop and continually sharpen their critical literacy.

The path to effective and impactful writing is not about love. It’s about respect, flexibility, and control. What I don’t do is teach students to love writing. Instead, I teach them to understand writing as hard but necessary—and rewarding—work. Even when student writers think writing “shouldn’t be” hard work, it is. My hope is that students come to understand that their writing labor matters—that their writing matters. By cultivating respect for rhetoric, language, and productive dialogue, I help students see that writing affords them access to new communities, new audiences, even new lives. Helping them understand the value of writing—and providing judgment-free spaces for them to practice flexible and controlled writing—is what I strive for in all of my courses. 

Ultimately, however, I seek to promote student writers’ sense of writerly ownership.

It’s their writing and I want them to own it.