Humor In Writing

2.3 Humor as a useful and motivating writing technique

Teaching writing is a process that requires flexibility and patience. Some students coming to college have already equipped with writing skill, whereas some have not. As a college teacher, you can help learners feel good about writing and lead them to become interested in it. In the writing process, pre-writing stage is the first step that is always the most difficult to take, in which teachers and students invest considerable time and energy. In this stage, brainstorming ideas and developing a strictly-formatted outline with thesis and topic sentences are required, which can make students feel bored with writing. Accordingly, the key to success in this stage is helping learners find topics

Keating, January 27, 2014). It also promotes the organization of ideas as well as motivates students to write. According to the article, Humor helps learners to write effectively and eases any concern related to the writing so that they do not think it is a burden. Through Humor, learners pay more attention to the writing as a democratic learning environment that provides writing with authentic purposes (Bainbridge). Apart from direct benefits of Humor in education like improving retention of information, better material understanding and student performance’s increase (Garner, 2006; Lucas, 2005; Wanzer); recent researchers have found indirect advantages of Humor known as increasing teacher immediacy and lessening distances in psychology between teachers and students, creating a more open and safer educational environment (Garner, 2006; Gorham, 1990; Lucas, 2005). Firstly, Gorham & Christophe (1990) found that a number of teachers’ immediacy behavior who used Humor could lessen the teacher-student psychological distance. It is a condition to make learning more conductive. Secondly, Garner (2006) mentioned that the enhancement of using Humor could result in higher student ratings of the lessons, the teachers or the course. Finally, Ziv studied the effects on student learning with humor teaching and concluded that “students appreciate and enjoy working with any teachers who

The research shows that during the time of correcting learners’ mistakes, teachers need to understand SLA to be aware of learners and access their process and development linguistic in an insightful manner. Hence, Humor can be used with many writing problems, for example, “misplaced commas, confused phrasing, spelling mistakes and other errors in teaching moment” (James R. Keating, January 27, 2014). The article adds the critical role of teachers who must be creative in creating a conductive environment to students’ optimal learning. Errors are always seen in the writing process, thus, with creating a positive atmosphere, any unwanted and negative impressions can be derived from the use of humor in correcting mistakes. In other words, Humor used in the error correction will create strong images and have potential to affect students’ emotional level (Lu, August 2010). The Feedback from lecturers appears to bring benefits to students’ self-efficacy that relates to student motivation and effective writing teaching (Harnett,