Literary writings

My first literature class for the year started this morning at 8.30am, making me wake up 2 hours earlier for it. It is a 24-hour module on assessment of writing, and will examine the setting evaluating of literary writings. The teacher has an informal unpretentious leading style, and that made it a lot easier to digest this dry topic.

We read two different essays, one from a secondary 1 schoolgirl and another from a JC student taking the literature special paper, and made comparisons about the knowledge, skills and attitudes required from the students through the writing tasks. Near the end of the session, the tutor asks of us to write down five sentences on how we will want to teach writing. She did not asks us to share our opinions, but inquired if some of us had wrote down certain commonly used strategies like showing model essays, giving ample amount of writing practice to students, and setting creative writing tasks etc.

Well, what I wrote down personally was way off the mark - I wrote down my philosophy towards teaching writing rather than concrete solutions to achieve good writing standards. Here they are:

1. Personal expressions must be honest but not necessarily emotional, strong but not unreasonable.
2. Writing certain content requires certain 'templates', which serves the deliver of the message and therefore should be followed.
3. Reasoning must be explicit in the writing - it shows a clear mind.
4. To understand what is superfluous in the exposition of a certain topic/theme.
5. To see the ambiguity of messages and learn to use words appropriately and judiciously.

Anything more I should add? I shall try to impart all these to the best of my abilities.