Weaving Words, Building Community

While the individual writing of students often blows me away, some of the most powerful writing occurs when those individual pieces are woven together into a collective whole. At Project Write Now, we do this through various collaborative writing projects, including two of my favorites: “Post-it Poetry” and “The Write Around.”

At Red Bank Middle School, for example, at the end of a writing session, I invite my 7th and 8th grade students to select their favorite lines they wrote that day and jot them on Post-it notes. Then I gather these notes and type the lines into a document, arranging them in a way that makes poetic sense. 

New pieces emerge holding the voices of everyone in the room. It’s so powerful seeing how it always works. And there’s nothing like seeing my students’ faces light up when they hear their line read out loud during the following session. You can check out our most recent collaborative works from the start of 2025, here. 

Another guaranteed hit with any writing group I facilitate is The Write Around. And I really mean any writing group. I have done this exercise with 6th graders and with a room full of adults. I have brought it to college classrooms, high school classrooms, and middle schoolers, too. No matter the age, The Write Around seems to always be a beloved writing exercise.

The Write Around is a collaborative exercise where each participant adds a sentence to create a larger story. You can do this in various ways. I like to have more than one story going at once, for example, by having each student write one line to a story on a piece of paper and then pass it to the writer sitting next to them. The papers get passed around until everyone has contributed one line to each story. You can also put giant Post-its on a wall and have the students walk from Post-it to Post-it, adding their lines.

What makes this such a hit has a lot to do with the lack of expectation and the thrill of surprise. You are only required to write one sentence, not expected to tell an entire story. Still, a story is being formed, and you get to experience the surprise of what it becomes while also helping create it. Here’s one I did with a teen writing group over the summer.

My personal favorite reason for The Write Around is the silliness that is bound to occur. Imaginations get stretched farther than ever before when each participant keeps trying to outshine the last sentence. What could be even more shocking now? Could there be an explosion? An alien invasion? Stories take the wildest turns when the pen writing them is being held by multiple hands. 

Collaborative writing projects are some of my favorite activities because they encourage and allow for full participation as students connect with one another by sharing their words and joining their voices. This is especially meaningful for writers who are shy or hesitant to share their work. While they may not share their own writing by reading it out loud, they get to hear their words as part of a larger piece. I’ve seen this experience build confidence in their abilities, giving them the encouragement to share more and more.

Writing in these ways becomes a communal act, rather than a private, isolated one, as writing can often be. It brings people together—building community by building stories.