Creative Writing in the Secondary School

Abstract

CREATIVE writing, as it applies to a school program, a course of study, covers a wide range of practice in American secondary education. There is the anything goes class, with little restriction in either subject or writing. Another class lets the student choose his subject freely but holds him to academic standards of writing. Creative writing may be a special-interest course for students gifted with imagination and the ability and desire to write, selective in its enrollment and exacting in its demands. Or it may be a dumping ground for students unable to meet the requirements of regular college preparatory English. It may also be a therapeutic course where, under the guidance of a specially-trained teacher, students with sick personalities, antisocial tendencies, or emotional stresses write out their imbalance through creative expression and attain some curative value in the process. In limitation of forms a creative writing course may assign only stories and plays and verses, or it may include not only fiction and poetry but all forms of short writingformal and informal essays and articles, autobiographical sketches, descriptive pieces, and even library papers. Thus when a critic or detractor of