Teaching Tip of the Week: Encouraging "Bad" Writing with Playful Writing Prompts
Hi, everyone. Al DeCiccio, Coordinator of the Writing Center here. This tip is all about "bad" writing, why it's valuable for writers, and how you can encourage it in the classroom.
Bad writing? What’s bad writing and why would we want our students to produce it?
The idea of bad writing emerges from a Donald Murray essay titled “The Importance of Bad Writing and How to Encourage It.” The essay speaks to how writers need to play with writing before they can have what Alex Peary calls the “prolific moment,” which results in mindful, consequential writing.
“Be responsible,” Murray writes. “Learn how to encourage really bad writing in your students and in yourself: the awful, the clumsy, the illogical, the awkward, the different, the weird, the mixed-up, the incoherent, the messy, the distorted in which new meanings may hide. Be a Peter Elbow who enjoys and delights in bad writing and knows what to do with it. Share the strange satisfaction of receiving bad writing with your students until they, too, delight in the poor writing from which good writing grows.”
Here are some playful prompts Murray offers that you may want to try with your students. I can assure you that, rather than “‘good’” writing, supermarket white bread instead of home-baked, satisfying, dark bread,” as Murray describes, you’ll get what he calls “challenging failures packed with potential”— maybe even excellent writing.
1. Write about what you don’t know anything about. Or follow Grace Paley’s advice, “We write about what we don't know about what we know.”
2. Lie. Make up the research. Empathize. Imagine. You may find the facts after you’ve found the truth.
3. Choose an uncomfortable distance. Get too close to the subject, or too far away.
4. Use an inappropriate genre. Write a poem for a memo and a memo as a poem.
5. Reverse the order. Construct a flimsy structure. Be illogical. Move against the natural sequence of thought, travel, or time.
6. Create an imbalance of the proportions of the piece. Have too much description or too little; too much exposition or no exposition; all dialogue or no dialogue.
7. Distort the pace of the piece of the writing. Write in a musical form that is inappropriate, change the beat.
8. Look at the subject from an unexpected point of view. Tell the love story from the point of view of the gossip, and the story of the scientific breakthrough from the point of view of the janitor who cleans the laboratory.
9. Write at a pace that is uncomfortable for you: too fast or too slow.
10. Write with your left hand if you’re right-handed. (Artists will do that when they feel they are too skilled at their drawing, or they may attach their pen to a yardstick.) ((Interview artists, musicians, scientists, craftspersons, creative people to see what they do to protect themselves against their skills.))
11. Ghostwrite. Write from someone else’s point of view in their voice, not yours.
12. Write in a language that is not your own. Use a false voice.
13. Write for an audience with which you are unfamiliar. Write for young children, or retired people, experts or amateurs, people who are emotionally involved in the subject, or those who couldn’t care less.
14. Require a ridiculous length of yourself. Tell the history of the world in one paragraph. Write 50 pages on sitting in a chair.
15. If you have a foreign language, write in that, then translate. If you don’t, write in an oral language you know that is more informal or more formal than your normal writing language.
16. If you write easily, make the writing hard, work with tension, anxiety, and pathological care; if writing is hard for you, free-write, stream your consciousness, loop, flow.
17. If you write in short chunks of time, tie yourself in your chair, as John McPhee used to when he was a beginning writer, and write for a whole day. If you write only in long periods, set a timer and write in 15-minute chunks during the day.
18. Change your purpose. If you write to persuade, write to entertain. If you write to entertain, write to inform.
19. If you’re a morning writer write late at night, between yawns, when your guard is down and your eyes unfocused. If you are a night writer write in the morning before you get out of bed, before your guard is up, between yawns, when your eyes won’t focus.
20. Take the best piece of writing you’ve done (or a good piece of writing by one of your favorite authors) and work it over to make it really bad, fascinatingly dreadful, brilliantly awful.
Sincerely,
Writing Center Coordinator, Al DeCiccio, Ph.D.
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If you or your department would like to set up an appointment to discuss anything related to the teaching of writing, please email WIC Coordinator Tanya Rodrigue at trodrigue@salemstate.edu. Other resources on the teaching of writing can be found on the WIC Canvas site. If you would like to set up an appointment to discuss anything related to the teaching of first-year writing or multilingual writers, please email Amy Minett at aminett@salemstate.edu. If you have any questions about the writing center, please contact Al DeCiccio at adeciccio@salemstate.edu.