How can we develop creative reading and writing?

            The writing to learn ideas in chapter 2 of Content-Area Writing got me to think more about all the things as students we have graded and how it affects our mind set of writing and reading.  So many students spend hours upon hours agonizing over the paper they are writing.  They scrutinize it for grammatical and content perfection and then hand it over to 1 or 2 more people to analyze. So when most students get a few hours to relax they pick the T.V., internet, social media sites, malls, etc. to unwind.  The pressure of school related, graded writing and reading tasks has caused many young adults to be turned off by these tasks to consider them leisure activities.  When students do pick up a book to read they most often choose fantasy books that take them away from their real lives like: Harry Potter, Twilight, and  Lord of the Rings, to name a few.  Writing is something that most young adults do constantly throughout the day.  They are on their phones texting from the moment they wake up until they go to bed at night.  They are on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter chatting, commenting, and posting constantly.  Most young adults are using slang with no grammar on these sites.  As teachers, we are concerned that their continued use of these sites with poor to no grammar is causing destructive grammar habits.  This may be true for a minority of students, but for others it is a great opportunity for them to develop their personal style of writing.  Things like grammar and proper words are left out because many see them as time consuming and unimportant when chatting with friends.  Most of the young adult population understands that the informal language they use on these sites in not appropriate for a business or school setting.  Unlike the social media sites, in the school setting students have so many constraints on what they have to write, how they have to write it, and what they need to read that the creativity never makes it onto the page.  In order to develop the young minds in our classrooms, we need to give the students more freedom in writing.  We don’t always need to pull out a red pen and mark-up everything they write or dictate every book they need to read.  Giving them the option to take things in their own direction, granted with a little guidance, will allow students to grow and develop their own creativity and love for reading and writing.