Improving writing through creativity

Trabalho de Projecto apresentado para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ensino do Inglês

This project is the result of an attempt to answer the question “Can Creative Writing Be Taught?” proposed by Francine Prose (2007), in the first chapter of her book Reading Like a Writer. It also aims to show the difficulties of implementing such a project in the classroom, due to factors such as lack of time, the pressure of teaching a very tight syllabus, and the working conditions students and teachers have in order to succeed. In order to implement the project, a series of activities was set up. Through music, paintings, drawings, hand paintings and other materials, the students produced words and simple sentences, which were enlarged so as to become complex sentences and paragraphs. Each piece of material was prepared bearing in mind the ideas the students had produced during the previous session, so that a connection could be established between all elements. The main purpose of these strategies was to lead the students into writing a story. Lastly, this project aims at showing how the different creative writing activities contributed to a greater awareness of individual writing errors and error-correction, improving the students‟ writing skill as a whole.