Teaching Writing Quotes

Teaching English and teaching Writing are two separate things.

Teaching writing puts you on the point of a pin in terms of what you want your own writing to be.

I loved teaching. It was my world. I only left because I was overwhelmed with three careers - teaching, writing, and my family.

In teaching writing, I'm learning new things about writing.

Teaching writing is a hustle.

In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.

Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.

Over time I learned that there are two very different satisfactions that you can have in your life. One is the satisfaction of becoming skilled at something. It almost doesn't matter what the terrain is. There is a deep, soul-feeding resonance in mastery itself, whether in teaching, writing a complicated software program, coaching a baseball team, or marshalling a group of people to start a new business.

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

Before I got my present job, I spent many years teaching writing part-time, so-called, at community colleges and universities. It's academia's version of migrant labor.