How to Create Writers Not Strugglers

by Laura E. Gonzalez

Enabling students to understand writing through their perspective

Laura E. Gonzalez has developed a solution for students that struggle with writing based on their personality and she calls it a Survival Guide to Writing. She has been interested in the past couple of years in the learning approaches with regards to writing. While she has observed that there are many writing instructors that claim they have the best way to teach students, she could not ignore the fact that there are still many college English students who struggle with writing. With this problem in mind she began investigating why it was that students continued to struggle, if these methods had been proven to work. Using Carl Jung’s work on personality types, Laura found that learning and understanding writing was greatly connected to how a personality type prefers to learn rather than the set methods that many teachers have focused on for years.

Carl Jung was a psychologist that researched personality and found that the basis of personality consisted of 8 characteristics that include preferring either introversion or extraversion, understanding something through concrete ideas or through exploring the possibility of a concept, thinking or feeling, and of organization or flexibility. Of the eight characteristics individuals, she found, are inclined to choose four.

To further her investigation Laura interviewed successful students that where currently enrolled in a variety of English classes. She found that students were successful at writing, not because they were naturally good, but rather because they had developed strategies that they used for writing their “easy papers.” These papers came easier to them because it fit in with their personality preference of understanding. Despite being good at one type of writing they all had other types of writing that they struggled with. When asked how they overcame their struggles, Laura found that each individual expressed that they had gone through a process that consisted of adapting and applying their strategies to papers that were hard for them to write instead of learning new strategies.

Observing this new information for the first time, Laura created a strategy guide in which a set of approaches are provided to practice and write according to students’ personality learning preferences. Her main purpose in creating this strategy guide was to enable students to improve in their own writing by developing strategies that they can understand and apply through identifying their preferred way of learning. Students should focus on polishing their old strategies and applying them to the papers they struggle with so the process of writing isn't as hard for them as it might be without those strategies. Students, she believes, need to be able to find their preferred method of learning and apply it to writing, so that they are able to better understand hence learn.