"Writing is very boring" or is it?

As a writing teacher, you may have heard this countless times from your students “WRITING IS VERY BORING.” The reason is that students are required to sit and think about what they are going to write, and if the topics are something they are unfamiliar with, this will be even more challenging for them.

However, it is in fact not true at all. Writing can also be an engaging activity if we can figure out ways to make it more engaging. As a matter of fact, writing is a versatile subject, and there are many ways that you can engage and encourage the students to write.

This semester, I am teaching a writing course and I have implemented a weekly writing assignment for my students. However, I recognize that this task poses a significant challenge as it requires students to consistently come up with new and interesting ideas for their writing topics. So, if I just let the students write the same thing over and over again, they will eventually get bored and feel demotivated with writing. Therefore, I need to come up with different ways to inspire them to write.

One of my latest successful efforts in writing is describing pictures. I'm blessed to be teaching on a campus full of sceneries, and I can make use of that. You never realize that the school grounds that you walk on every day contain many interesting things once you pay attention to them. In this activity, I told my students to walk around the campus for 20 minutes and capture pictures of anything they find peculiar or interesting. When they came back, the students were motivated to share what they had.

Their written work was not only meaningful but also creative. This proves that it's not the writing tasks themselves that are boring, but the prompt for the writing. It is essential that teachers come up with meaningful topics for the students to write. Most importantly, students can't use AI to produce this kind of text at all even if they want to. This personalized writing task makes student put their efforts enthusiastically into completing it.

Overall, I believe that writing can be a highly interactive and meaningful approach to teaching language, particularly when the topics allow students to explore and reflect on their everyday activities. Regardless of the size of your classroom or campus, this activity can be easily implemented if we encourage students to pause and observe their surroundings. This practice will not only assist students in developing their language skills but also enable them to learn about themselves and their community by empowering them through the act of writing.