personal experience ain’t always the easiest topic for student writers

This past quarter, when I was in a consultation with one of my regular English 085 (”The Writing Workshop”) students, I was surprised that he couldn’t come up with much to say in his Self-Evaluation and that what he did say sounded fake (as if he was just writing what he thought Dodie wanted to [...]

it was a personal experience, not a camera left running by itself

Often students will write narratives that are full of details and movement, but sound dry and mechanical because they’ve left off the human presence, basically. They tell what happened to them, but often not in a way that gives the reader of sense of what the events mean to them or how the events affected [...]