Finding Yourself In The Words You Write: A Manifesto by Lisa Corbett

I believe people lose themselves in the words they read and find themselves in the words they write.  Writing is where we find our truth.  It’s how we take our opinions and ideas and form them into coherent thoughts.  We write what we think, we revise our thinking, we make it clear, we ask ourselves if it is what we really think and what we really believe. We write a new life for ourselves when we write fiction.  We think about how something could have gone differently, or how it could have been better. 

I believe that writing is active, reading is passive, and everything kids write helps them become better readers.  When we ask kids to read what they have written, they realize that their writing needs to make sense.  It needs to sound right.  It needs to communicate what we really mean.  It’s important to be able to attempt to guess another author’s purpose - but it’s a different experience to know your own purpose, and then figure out how to share that with others. 

I believe teachers of writers should be writers. I’m certainly not the first person to say this. But I have lived this life. I honed my personal writer’s craft so I could be a better teacher of writers.  It has improved my whole life, not just my teaching life. 

I believe that making my own writing public has been a vital part of that journey.

I believe everyone can become a writer. It will take effort! But it’s time well spent. When I was in my 4th year of teaching, I taught 5th grade on a rotary team.  The teaching team was discussing our common students.  One of the teachers said, “I think some kids are just born writers. The words flow out of them so smoothly!  But other kids can work really hard on a piece and it just won’t sound great. They just weren’t born to write.”  This bothered me for years!  I felt she was wrong, that writing was something we could teach and that the right teacher could turn anyone into a writer.  This became a driving force behind my teaching - to prove her wrong. If I could share student writing samples here, I think you’d see I have succeeded. 


Lisa Corbett has been teaching for 18 years. She has mostly taught grades 2, 3, and 4.  She lives in Ontario, Canada, and is a graduate of Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey.  On days when it’s -25 degrees (celsius), all she can think is, “Life is better at the Jersey Shore!” She doesn't write nearly as much as she used to before she became a mom. Lisa blogs about her life at alotalot.wordpress.com and about her math teaching at mrscorbettsclass.wordpress.com.  You can find Lisa on Twitter more often than she cares to admit at  @LisaCorbett0261.

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