All we can do is help them along, assist them as best as we can. If what our students must do is something that they must do on their own, therefore, the best thing we as teachers can do is give them the kind of doing that will do the most for them. For a long time now I have been entertaining the suspicion that the most effective teaching of writing is synonymous with the giving of the most effective writing assignments. If my own assumption is correct, though, then neither their experiences nor their preformed convictions will move our students far along the path of exhilarating and significant progress as writers or thinkers in their own right. What I am about to claim may seem shocking at first, but I believe that the best writing assignments are responses to words, to words and nothing but words, period.
All writing is a kind of playing with words.
This is not to say that all a competent writer has to do is go to his or her favorite dictionary and simply select a few thousand words in a random order. Such randomly selected words would not constitute the game of writing. When I say that what a good writing assignment should do is simply allow the students to play with words, therefore, I am not being forgetful of the fact that words are ideas. In fact, I would go so far to say that only words are ideas, that there are no ideas without words, other than words, beyond words. We are all, in a sense, constituted by our ideas, which are brought to us by the words of our respective languages.