Establishing a Metanarrative in Creative/Academic Writing: An Exercise to Help Students with Writing

The teaching of creative writing and the teaching of writing for academic purposes (EAP) have generated a number of fruitful methodologies. In this paper, we discuss, in particular, two of those: the 'product' approach and the 'process approach'. These two approaches may, however, provide students with a view of the writing process, which can be somewhat fragmented and partial. We propose a third type of exercise, which tries to bridge these approaches. This exercise type has an additional and important element in that it empowers students to articulate a view of the creative writing process as a whole. This empowerment can give students a metalanguage that feeds into commentary and critique; not only for undergraduate assessment but also for MA students and those undertaking creative writing PhDs.