Let’s say you have thought about your reasons to write, and you want to get started. But how do you start?
I guess the best scenario is that you already feel the urge to share something with a wider circle of people than your immediate environment (family, staffroom, local association), rather than “just” the wish to write without knowing what about.
But even if you know what you want to write about, it can feel like a daunting task if you’ve never written for the “public”. So, how do you start?
Writing for teacher development
In my case, I started by taking notes for myself in private. Writing needs practice and this is a “non-threatening” way of doing it as there is no public.
Then, I started taking notes on my lessons and sharing lessons plans publicly on my first professional blog about my experiences of teaching in the 3D virtual world Second Life. Blogging is a wonderful way of starting writing publicly. The posts can be short, they can be informal and personal. Some people like writing guest posts on other people’s blogs without committing themselves to their own; others might find it easier to write on their own as they can decide what the style will be, the length, the topics, etc. A third option is to write for blogs of publishing houses, online magazines, and similar.
The next, bigger step would be to write an article for submission to a magazine or journal. It’s easier to write for a professional magazine because it doesn’t need to be academic, and they will accept shorter pieces as well. Many start by writing book reviews or submitting lesson plans and similar.
A great way of making this task easier is to write a series of blog posts on a topic and then combine these and rewrite for an article in a professional magazine. I did this with my blog posts about teaching in Second Life – my first published article in a print magazine!
I have also rewritten some of my MA assignments for publication, for example, my article on using podcasts in an English course for taxi drivers. Like with the blog post series, it makes the task easier because it’s already written. But it needs to be rewritten for a different audience, which can mean making it less academic or less formal, using fewer sources, shortening the text, adding new sections, removing others, etc.
For book chapters, you can do the same as for articles, but they might need to be more academic; therefore, it might be easier to rewrite dissertations rather than blog posts, because the former will already have references. In book chapters, they also often want some results, some kind of research with outcomes. In most cases, there will be a call for chapters to which you can submit your proposal, and if they accept it, you write the full chapter. For my first short book chapter, I have rewritten my MA assignment about the taxi driver course for a book on blended learning. You can compare it with the one for the magazine in the paragraph above to see how they differ in length, style, formality, images, etc.
I have also written a longer book chapter completely from scratch based on an editorial brief about technology-integrated ESP lessons. This has been the most challenging one for me so far.
The next step would be to write a complete (e)book. I don’t see that happening anytime soon 😉 but I’ve edited quite a few written by someone else.
Writing course materials
Just like when writing for teacher development purposes, writing course materials was a gradual process for me, and probably is for many. I can’t think of any example where a teacher who has never written anything would suddenly start writing a whole coursebook. Let me know if you know anyone 🙂
So, it usually goes something like this (which is how it has been for me):
- write some extra exercises for your students
- write extra activities to go with a coursebook unit
- substitute some coursebook activities
- write whole worksheets
- substitute a whole coursebook unit with more relevant content and tasks
- write a complete course or set of materials for your students with special needs (EAP, ESP, etc.)
- share lesson plans, worksheets, or courses you have written publicly on your blog (SLexperiments), or a special course website (English for taxi drivers, English for city planners)
- write for someone else (a school, publisher, online lesson plan banks, etc.)
Writing course materials for others is still a very new experience for me and so is the logical (?) next step: editing the work of other writers. But it’s exciting and I’m learning a lot in the process.
Where are you in your writing journey and where would you like to be?