Using Creative Writing to Improve Memory LIZ REGAN KIINGI AND JULIA DEAN
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s English teachers, we often use analytical writing assignments to assess reading comprehension and understanding. However, one underutilized method for engaging with text is creative writing. English teachers have been using close reading and passage analysis for years to highlight important moments in stories and to help students dig into word choice to produce a concise, formal written analysis. But what happens when a student tries to put herself or himself into a character’s metaphorical shoes? Engaging in this type of creative writing task changes the exercise from an external literary analysis to an internal view of a character’s feelings and emotions. One goal of the creative writing exercise – and reading in general – is to create empathy and develop students’ theory of mind, which involves understanding why someone acts in a particular way or predicting how someone will act.1 Empathy and theory of mind are both central to social cognition, and researchers have determined that character-driven stories consistently lead to the synthesis of oxytocin, a hormone which motivates cooperation with others by strengthening one’s sense of empathy.2 In addition to enhanced social cogni-
tion, an important outcome of this creative writing task is the improvement of memory. Using stories to learn activates the brain’s positive emotional state and transfers the information more readily into memory.3 For students with strong memory or those who love the story, remembering events and scenes may not be that difficult. But what about students who do not necessarily connect with the storyline or characters? What could help them remember key scenes? To answer this question, we asked our students to engage in the exercise of writing from the perspective of another character. An fMRI study found that when participants continued to write creatively from a literary text that was given to them, the areas of their brain at work were those involving language processing, working memory, and the long term memory system.4 We saw this impact firsthand; while engaged in this creative writing task, students juggled a myriad of cognitive tasks, including remembering plot details, character traits, common language used by the character, and the context of the scene students were asked to recreate. When students in English 8 were asked to choose a character from the jail scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the scene in which Atticus is guarding Tom Robinson
An fMRI study found that when participants continued to write creatively from a literary text that was given to them, the areas of their brain at work were those involving language processing, working memory, and the long term memory system. 22
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