I think the Six-Word Memoir is a great idea. I like it because even though it's used with a younger group of writers, I can see it working for all ages and skill levels. It seems like it would be a great gateway into drafting for memoir, because it begins as a teaser for writers. It's small scale, causes less anxiety in creating as a first assignment, and could very well be developed into something larger. It's difficult to get writers, especially first year or returning student writers to want to write and this assignment gets the writer thinking like an author. One must edit and draft a phrase that is representative of personality and experience, and this requires time and thinking. It is a simple activity that encourages meta cognition, and good writers think this way.
When an instructor takes on this responsibility alone, it often becomes tedious. It's very difficult to make a student think about what they write. It's fabulous to scaffold them into it. This assignment helps students be there own editor, automatically. They begin the writing with thinking, as opposed to writing and then thinking. This gives them a perspective into audience, tone, memory, and a number of other literary devices that allows them to be even more creative. The beauty of the assignment in my opinion is that is could work well with inexperienced writers and skilled authors, which makes its efficiency productive for the instructor :)
I've used this with writing camp kids and have heard amazing stories from a colleague who teaches high school. They're also great for literature. i.e., Write Hamlet's six-word memoir. I love it because kids have to do a lot of work to get a short piece of writing done, so that they will take longer to do the work than it will take you to read it.
ReplyDeleteI wrote Harry Potter's last summer: Seven years to defeat evil: Riddikulus.