Students mostly have been seen complaining about their dislike or fear of writing. But, in reality the reason behind the disliking is they fall behind in the preparation and lack of enough knowledge base in the subject or the topic. This issue can only be resolved if they realize the root cause i.e. lack of interest and hard work on their part, never will they be able to improve their writing. The key to overcome their fear and develop their interest lies in opening their eyes and realization to their shortcomings.
Here are some useful strategies discussed to help students overcome their fear of writing.
Learn from the mistakes
Students must be told in the beginning of their classes that they are allowed to make mistakes in their writing, and that it will not affect their grades. With this knowledge they will immediately release their stress of writing. They must be given different topics for their home assignment on the topics read or done in the class, on the current events, or assigned a topic of their interest.
The activity will help them identify their weak areas in writing and so they can work on them. Practice is the key to become perfect, so with time and practice they will begin to see improvement.
Identify your mistakes
Students must inculcate the habit of proofreading and correcting their own work. The teachers must encourage them to identify their mistakes. In the beginning, they might not find many of their weak areas but gradually they will begin to identify their mistakes which will eventually improve and polish their writing as they will have the knowledge of their own difficulties and problems. This will prove to be their small achievements in the process of becoming a decent writer.
After exploring one’s own weak areas, students seem to be more receptive to peer reviews. They understand the benefits of the reviews they receive will only improve their writing. Students who think that they need constant guidance in the process of improving can find help from professionals from writing services online that provide essay help and in their academic writings.
Confidence Booster
To increase their confidence in writing, students must be given writing prompts as open-ended questions. Open-ended questions make students think in-depth about their answers to be written intelligently. This can be a very interesting writing activity to assign topics such as cultural diversity in the classroom, student’s issues in learning, and can be given in the form of questions as a writing activity.
One of the activities to be used as a confidence booster in writing, is to ask them to write , every one paragraph in fifteen minutes, for one hour. In the beginning of the activity some students might find it difficult to finish the activity in the allotted time but they will begin to see the transformation they go through as they try to finish the task.
At the end of the activity, ask students to reflect on their answers to the assigned question or topic and about their performance.
