I am a writing teacher. I am not an art teacher. However, I know that artistic expression is a fantastic way to get learners engaged in the writing process. The sticky spot is figuring out how to give feedback on these creative prompts that’s actually targeting the thing I want to target: writing development.
This post is about how I make writing prompts centered around artistic projects that still meet the goals I need them to meet.
Why Use Creative Prompts in Writing?
Think about some of the most common writing prompts:
- Book reports
- Summaries
- Share your opinion
- Tell a story
Often, learners are presented with the same kinds of writing experiences over and over again, and the work can feel stale, repetitive, and superficial.
Book reports, in particular, can be a slog. Instead of thinking about our writing assignments as a specific type of prompt, we can instead think about their overall purpose and goals.
Let’s take book reports as an example. Here are the usual goals of book reports:
- Make sure our learner actually read the book
- Practice attention to detail
- Identify major themes
- Analyze characters
- Trace major plot points
We can achieve these goals in so many ways (see this post on some alternatives to book reports), and spending a little time thinking about what activity is likely to engage our learners is often well worth the extra energy.
We’ll get better projects; they’ll have a more enjoyable time. It’s a win-win.
For many learners creative prompts are a great fit. Prompts that call for creating a piece of art, making a video, building a scene in Minecraft, etc. all call upon learners’ individual interests in a way that often gets more buy-in than a more traditional writing prompt.
But How Do You Give Feedback?
The hard part of using creative prompts in writing is that they can be tricky to evaluate.
Writing is a process, and we want to teach our writers to make multiple drafts of their work in order to practice that process in a meaningful way.
While this is also true of more creative pursuits, if we spend our time giving feedback on the colors used in a painting or the editing technique used in a video, we’re not really asking our learners to practice the process of writing. We’re asking them to become better artists, video editors, etc.
If you’re wanting to use a more creative exercise to help work on writing goals, the best way to do it is to add a process paper as a component of the assignment.
What's a Process Paper?
As the name suggests, a process paper is a piece of writing where the learner gets to reflect on the process they used to create their art.
For example, one of the options in my Middle School Writing with The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie is a creative project. The final chapter of the book discusses ways that Barbie has been used to make commentary on everything from body positivity to capitalism, and learners are invited to make a piece of art of their own.
I don’t give feedback on the art itself. Instead, I give feedback on the process paper about that art. They tell me why they chose the medium they did, what steps went into creating their work, what goals they think they achieved, and what lessons they learned from the work.
I give feedback on that paper, and it’s the process paper they revise from a rough draft to a final draft.
Combining Writing with Other Creative Projects Sparks Interest
Creating art is a form of writing. Any time we’re sharing ideas with the world (in a speech, in a sculpture, in a YouTube video, in an outfit we designed), we’re writing.
When it comes to academic settings where our writing needs to be evaluated and revised, though, we tend to think of the narrower definition of written/typed words on a page.
Using creative projects in combination with a process paper is the best of both worlds. It allows writers to explore modes of expression that best fit their interests while also providing practice in the specific academic conventions of writing a paper.
Some Creative Project Prompt Ideas
If you want to try out some creative project prompts in your own writing practice, you can use these as inspiration. Remember, pairing them with a process paper will give you a piece of the project you can focus on for feedback, revision, and more standard writing conventions.
- Pick a scene from the book that you think is pivotal to the plot. Re-read it, paying careful attention to descriptive details, and then draw or paint it as you imagine it. In your process paper, explain why you picked the scene, which details were directly from the book, and which ones you had to fill in on your own.
- The book shows [a scene focused on one character], but we don’t get to see how [another character not in the scene] responds. Dress up as this character and create a video responding to what happened. In your process paper, explain why you had the character respond this way and how you used voice, facial expression, and body language to make your point.
- In the book, we learn about [some nonfiction, fact-based element]. Create an attention-grabbing flyer that you could hang up at a popular outdoor festival to share this information. In your process paper, explain how you decided which information to include and how you made sure your flyer would get noticed.
