Stimulating Written Work

Before making any practical attempts to link drama and written work it is important to consider the nature of the relationship between the two, for it is easy to force and distort this, to push too much writing into dramatic performance or kill the enjoyment of successful improvisation with a predictable written coda. Any English written work must have sufficient stimulus and justification, and not every, nor even most written assignments should be exploited in drama work and similarly, not every piece of drama work should lead inexorably into a piece of writing. The Schools Council Writing across the Curriculum Project 1 confirmed that a frighteningly narrow range of transactional writing rules secondary school work and that far too much routine and unstimulating writing dominates all lessons. Thus, if we are to invite our pupils to write we must ensure that we have good reasons for doing so. Writing should not be seen merely as a time-filler or control mechanism and we must provide sufficient choices of topics and styles so that no one kind of writing, whether the story, the exercise, the summary or note-making, predominates at the expense of other types.