True Expression, age 12
I helped out at Austin Bat Cave on Tuesday, editing their soon to-be-released student anthology. After pouring over dozens of poems, short stories and writing exercises, I concluded that teenage writers can be classified into two groups:
- Kids writing like a writer.
- Kids writing the way they think.
The first group is comprised of “good students.” Their writing receives top marks for the use of big words, adjectives and adverbs. It might go something like this:
The forest was dark and eery, but the tall, handsome man wasn’t afraid - nothing frightened him now that he’d seen war.
The second group is a motley collection of students who are average, ESL, ADD, ADHD, low-income or who simply don’t care about school. Their writing receives poor marks for containing inappropriate language. Or for being one page instead of three. Or for starting sentences with conjunctions.
The way we are evaluating these students is backwards.
Stuff written by the second group may be rough, broken and confused - but it’s real. They don’t need an F, they need an editor. Thankfully, organizations like Austin Bat Cave free students from the constraints of our education system and allow them to be creative.
Here was my favorite piece from the anthology:
True expression is how you show what you’re doing. You could write, draw, doodle, sing and/or dance. I doodle to create and am creating a mural.
Start with something small and create something large.
Are you kidding me? That’s better than anything I’ve written in months.
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