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Quotes About Writing

quotes on writing

Quotes about writing to use in the classroom. Famous writing quotes, creative writing quotes...quotes on writing are found here!

If you are wanting to make an impact with your writing, try using famous writing quotes. An excellent use of quotes about writing would be those that:

Make an impact on the audience

Add a punch of humor

Build credibility within your writing

Famous Writing Quotes

1. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Author Unknown

I love to use this quote about writing to emphasize the importance of checking your work carefully. I ask one student to read it out loud, and often the child will put the word "left" in before the word "any." We then can analyze the sentence to show how what we think we have written and what we read sometimes is not what is really there.

2. Every writer I know has trouble writing.
Joseph Heller

Great quotes about writing can be used to introduce brainstorming topics. They give students a reason to brainstorm a list and to help see its' value. This is also a good creative writing quote to use when needing to prod some children along in the rough draft stage.

3. Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
Sylvia Plath

Students should always have opportunities to publish their writing and share it with an intended audience. Otherwise, who are they writing for? The teacher? Wow, that sure is motivating...real audience, real purpose, real writing. It's real simple.

4. The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Mark Twain

There are many quotes about writing, but this one is terrific for a lesson in descriptive writing. It also works well with visualizing what an author means.

5. A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order.
Jean Luc Godard

Why do we make students write the beginning of a story before the end? Why not let them write the solution to a problem first, then create the characters around the plot? Why not work backwards in a story?

6. Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
Isaac Asimov

There is a good reason why teachers tell their students to keep writing, anything at all! Okay, some teachers just want a bit of peace for twenty or thirty minutes, but good teachers know that when students continue writing (even when they say they don't know what to write), then that is when a breakthrough can occur. The best topics may start to form.

7. Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
Benjamin Franklin

Creative Writing Quotes

8. The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

Teach the students that it is okay to scratch off, scribble it out, or even throw it away and start fresh. It takes patience and perseverance to get a piece of writing good enough to publish (if it is for a real audience, not just an achievement test or for the teacher's eyes only). Show them how you write, revise, edit, revise again, then edit some more. They need to see you do it to know that they can too.

9. Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.
Jeanette Winterson

Great writing contains words, phrases and sentences that make us feel, imagine and get personally involved. Good teachers know that their students need to listen to stories, poetry, narratives, non-fiction, and everything in between. Read to your students at a level above what their independent reading level is. They can comprehend what they hear even if they could not read it themselves. You will be enriching their vocabulary and they, in turn, will begin to use it in their writing.

10. Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Anton Chekhov

Of all the descriptive quotes on writing, this is my favorite. Creative writing quotes should make the audience feel something, and this one does. Primary students love this type of word play. Why not do a whole class guided writing lesson on descriptive phrases, then leave them posted for the students to use in their own writing?

Try using these quotes about writing as jumping off points for your lessons.

Get creative with how you use quotes on writing (that is a quality of a good teacher!), and most of all, enjoy your students' writing and the process of it.

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