What Changes When Students Become Authors

There is a meaningful difference between asking a student to complete a writing assignment and asking that student to become an author. An assignment is usually written for the teacher and often ends when it is submitted, graded, and returned. Authorship introduces another question into the process: Who will read this?

When students know their words will travel beyond the classroom to families, classmates, teachers, community members, or the pages of a published anthology, their relationship with writing begins to change. Revision matters because there is a real reader on the other side of the page. Details matter because someone else needs to understand what the writer saw, felt, or experienced. Voice matters because the writing represents the student rather than simply the completion of an assignment.

Over the years, I have watched students hold books containing their own stories and respond with a kind of pride that is difficult to reproduce with a score written at the top of a paper. Publication gives students a sense that their words have permanence, but it also changes the classroom itself because students begin to read one another differently. They discover experiences they share, experiences they do not share, and aspects of their classmates’ lives they may never have known otherwise.

This is one of the reasons publication has remained central to Literate Voices. The finished book matters, of course, but what matters even more is the process that leads to it. Somewhere along the way, a young person who may have thought of writing simply as something required for school begins to understand that their experiences can become literature and that they have something worth saying to an audience beyond the classroom.