In my ninth-grade writing class last year, I met a cowboy who saved his town, a strict father who demanded his son earn straight A’s, and a modern-day Juliet who died of heartbreak after her parents rejected the love of her young life. More than once, I found myself wondering just how my students, who’d created these people, knew their subjects so well.

But things were different for their first essay, which was about the question: “Why is writing important?” Most of the essays filled less than one page, and few contained a sentence that could be interpreted as a thesis (论点) statement. I was shocked. Then I realized that the problem was the question itself. They could have written pages on the necessity of computers, but writing, in and of itself, simply didn’t strike them as important. This would have to change.

As a new unit started, I asked everyone to write a persuasive piece on a health-related topic of their choice. This time they found the exercise much more interesting. For the next two assignments, a personal-narrative unit followed by a creative-writing workshop, I only required that the piece meet the specifications of its genre (体裁) and that it contain a thesis. The results were staggering. The students took on diverse topics and turned in stories, 10 to 20 pages each, with characters that broadened my view and touched my heart.

I walked into class believing that writing is important as a means of communication. However, my students demonstrated something more important to me. When the final bell rang in June, I walked away with a yearbook full of messages about writing’s most powerful significance — the ability to connect people, to put us in another’s skin, to teach us what it means to be human.