A Short Take on Evaluation and Creative Writing

Creative writing has been the ugly stepsister in the English discipline for years. On one side, the literature scholars carry the torch for pure language, and, on the other side, the composition and rhetoric theorists approach writing like a science. Somewhere off in a dark corner, the creative writing staff loiters, getting paid to do nothing more than say what they think about student writing. The debate whether creativity can be taught smolders. Most creative writing teachers believe in the creative potential of all people, and that the right environment with prompts and encouragement can elicit creative work to a degree. Talent, motivation and desire always play an important role. Though creative writing involves innate talent, it is also a craft with tools, techniques, concepts. Any fledgling writer needs to learn the elements in order to practice, experiment, and perfect them. Though people argue that creative writing is subjective and personal in the end (and they are right), they are far less willing to argue that the elements of poetry, fiction, and drama are subjective. The elements are objective and should be a crucial part of the evaluation of creative writing coursework. This article presents an experiment which was devised to prove that students were learning about elements of poetry, fiction, and drama in a creative writing class. Since the evaluation of creative work is admittedly subjective, a parallel focus on writing elements was incorporated into class. In addition to writing prompts and helping-circle feedback, the poetry section involved figurative language, rhyme schemes, sound elements, images and forms of poetry. The fiction section covered character types, points of view, and innovative fiction. In playwriting, the concepts of tragedy, theatre of the absurd, and play format style were explored. (Contains 1 table.)