One of the websites I linked for Interactivity #3 was fictionpress.com. This is an interactive fiction website where amateur writers create free accounts and share stories for other users to critique. This website is important to me for several reasons. I've noticed that I have a firmer grasp on grammar than even some fellow English majors. This isn't, unfortunately, because my teachers were so much better than theirs - though they were definitely amazing and one reason I decided to follow in their footsteps. Rather, appropriating the techniques of popular writers on websites like this and even published authors helped me improve my own skills.
I also love fictionpress because, as well as being an English educator, I think of myself as a writer. I write short stories, novellas, poetry and have attempted (but have no patience for) longer stories. Along with teaching more formal writing, I am interesting in taking on creative writing classes, too. One thing I think would be fun to do for my creative writing students is to create a website like fictionpress for them, focused on only my students rather than anyone with access to the internet. Workshops are a major component of courses like this; students share their stories with classmates, everyone reads, everyone offers a like and a dislike in class, and everyone writes about a half a page of cohesive comments, along with margin comments throughout. If, instead of doing this in class, or as well as doing this in class, students posted to this website and received critique that way, they would leave a permanent (ish) imprint of their developing work online, for them to come back to and evolve from even upon losing hard-copies, but they'd also keep the feedback they need.
This would be an informal testing procedure for me, too. In my own creative writing classes, my professor is often clueless when students don't read their classmates' stories, but if that information is available online, I can see that every student has posted and weight what it is that they did comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment