World Building with Wes Phillipson, author of Teaching the Anti-Essay

I wanted to pull out the ideas that stayed with me most from my conversation with Wes Phillipson and translate them into a few practical possibilities for teachers planning the upcoming school year.

Our conversation centered on Wes’s Interiors/Worldbuilding assignment, which asks students to approach writing more like interior designers than like students filling in a template.

Matt: What led you to question formulaic essay instruction?

Wes: Traditional structures can give students support, but they can also become restrictive when students receive the topic, thesis, number of paragraphs, evidence requirements, and expected conclusion before they have discovered what they actually want to say.

Wes described the kind of writing he wants students to produce as “far more vigorous, robust, personal, intimate, vulnerable, and interesting.”

That distinction is important. The problem is not that students need structure. They do. The problem is when structure arrives before thinking and becomes the main thing students are trying to complete.

A student can learn how to produce a recognizable essay without ever learning how to develop an idea that feels genuinely theirs.

For me, this is one of the central questions teachers can consider when planning a unit:

Have I given students enough time to discover what they want to say before asking them to organize it?

Matt: How does the assignment work?

Wes asks students to think about writing as the design of a physical space. An interior designer decides what belongs in a room, what should be removed, what deserves attention, and how the different parts work together.

Wes asks students to make similar decisions on the page:

“Can you give me a look inside your mind? Can you show me how you think? Can you show me how you connect dots?”

The assignment begins with a simple activity. Students choose something small and familiar from their own world—a song, room, restaurant, object, meal, place, or routine—and write fifteen of their best possible sentences about it.

Wes models the activity by writing about Led Zeppelin’s “In the Evening.” He shows students how he connects the music to memories, images, metaphors, cultural references, and unexpected associations.

Then he asks students to do the same thing with something from their own lives.

The point is not for students to imitate Wes’s references. The point is for them to see that writing can begin with something they already know intimately.

A student may not think they have anything interesting to write about. But they may know a particular basketball court, video game, family meal, bus route, bedroom, or song better than anyone else in the room.

That knowledge can become the beginning of meaningful writing.

Matt: What can design teach students about writing?

Wes pointed out that English teachers often tell students to “add color” or “develop” an idea. The problem is that this language may identify what is missing without giving students a clear next step.

As Wes put it:

“It doesn’t really give them an action item with which to engage and enact.”

The Interiors assignment gives students a more concrete vocabulary. They can think about:

• texture and layering

• contrast and juxtaposition

• focal points

• repetition and motifs

• atmosphere

• what belongs and what creates clutter

A detail such as “the rug was red” does not automatically make writing stronger. The student still needs to ask:

• Why does this detail matter?

• What does it reveal?

• Does it create contrast?

• Does it connect to a memory or larger idea?

• Does it contribute to the atmosphere?

• Could it become part of a repeated image or pattern?

This is more useful than simply telling students to add more description.

Students do not necessarily need more details. They need practice making decisions about details.

That idea can apply to analytical writing as well. A paragraph is not only a topic sentence, quotation, explanation, and concluding sentence. It can also have rhythm, movement, contrast, repetition, and emphasis.

The question becomes:

How can I arrange this writing so the reader experiences the idea rather than simply receives information about it?

Matt: What can this assignment reveal that a traditional essay prompt might not?

Wes said that the assignment can show students that “essay writing can be a delight.”

He also offered a line that stayed with me:

“Serendipity trumps an outline every time.”

I do not think this means outlines are useless. An outline can be valuable once a writer has discovered enough material to organize.

But sometimes students need to write their way toward an idea before they can structure it effectively.

The fifteen-sentence activity may help students discover:

• a connection they did not expect to make

• a sentence that sounds like them

• a new way to use punctuation

• a memory they had not considered important

• a pattern that could shape the entire piece

This is where writing becomes an experimental process rather than a performance of something the teacher has already decided.

Matt: Can personal writing be as rigorous as writing about a book?

Wes challenged the assumption that writing about literature is automatically analytical while personal writing is somehow less serious.

He pointed out that many essays about books become book reports. Students summarize the text, insert quotations, and repeat interpretations that have already been established by the teacher or class.

A personal essay can require just as much thinking. Students still have to make decisions about perspective, sequence, language, evidence, significance, and meaning.

Wes explained:

“The more personal the essay is, the more world building that student does.”

This connected with an assignment I have used after reading memoirs such as I Am Malala and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative. Students studied how those writers shaped lived experiences and then used some of those techniques to write about a moment from their own lives.

The purpose was not simply to make the writing personal. It was to help students understand how experience becomes crafted nonfiction.

As Wes pointed out, much of what students write in English class is nonfiction about fiction. That means students also need opportunities to write nonfiction about the world they actually inhabit.

This does not mean abandoning literary analysis. It means expanding what analysis can look like.

A student could use a text as a starting point and then connect it to a place, memory, cultural experience, object, or question that they genuinely understand. The text becomes part of a larger world rather than the entire boundary of the assignment.

Matt: How can teachers provide support without designing the entire world for students?

Wes offered one of the most important ideas from our conversation:

“You’re not the expert. I’m not the expert. I’m not the expert of their world.”

A student may know more about their family, culture, music, neighborhood, memories, or interests than the teacher does.

That does not make the teacher unnecessary. The teacher is still the expert in writing, diction, syntax, organization, revision, and audience.

But the student should remain the expert on the subject.

Wes compared the teacher to a record producer:

“I’m the record producer. They’re the talent. They’re the artists.”

That comparison gives teachers an important role without requiring them to control every decision. We can help students shape the work without taking ownership of it.

This also means that creative assignments need to be low-stakes. We cannot tell students to take risks and then punish them with a rigid rubric because their work does not resemble our preferred version of writing.

Before students attempt something unfamiliar, give them “ways of being.” Show them possible approaches:

• You could use humor.

• You could make an unexpected comparison.

• You could write through sensory details.

• You could use repetition.

• You could include cultural references.

• You could experiment with sentence length or punctuation.

• You could begin with a memory, image, question, or contradiction.

The goal is not to give students another formula. It is to give them enough possibilities to begin.

Near the end of the conversation, I introduced Wes to The CARE Teaching Method: Clarify, Articulate, Refine, and Execute.

CARE is not another required structure for the final essay. It is a flexible way to make the learning process visible.

Applied to the Interiors/Worldbuilding assignment, it could look like this:

• Clarify: What small part of my world do I want to explore? What do I want the reader to notice, feel, or understand?

• Articulate: What do I notice, remember, question, and connect? The fifteen-sentence activity belongs here.

• Refine: Which details deserve to remain? What should be removed, rearranged, repeated, or developed?

• Execute: What finished piece can I create from these decisions?

Wes connected this to independent learning:

“A big part of independent practice happens before the product is made.”

That is an idea worth carrying into lesson planning. Independent learning does not begin only when students are sent away to complete homework. It begins when they start forming questions, making choices, exploring possibilities, and developing their own material.

A teacher could collect one small artifact from each stage:

1. rough notes or fifteen initial sentences

2. a selected idea with an explanation

3. a short revision or design decision

4. a finished piece and brief reflection

This gives teachers evidence of thinking without forcing every student to produce the same final structure.

Instead of beginning with a traditional icebreaker, Wes suggested giving students a creative, low-stakes writing experience.

Ask students to choose something small and familiar from their world. Then give them this prompt:

Write fifteen sentences that help another person experience this thing through your eyes, ears, memories, and associations.

Model the process first. Read your own example aloud. Explain how one detail led to another. Show students that the goal is not to sound impressive but to notice something specifically.

Then offer them several “ways of being”:

• humorous

• reflective

• sarcastic

• sensory

• analytical

• metaphorical

• personal

• culturally specific

Afterward, ask students to look back at their sentences and identify:

• the sentence that feels most like them

• the most unexpected connection

• one detail that creates atmosphere

• one detail that may not yet serve a purpose

• one idea they might develop further

Keep the activity low-stakes. Treat it as a workshop or experiment, not as a test of whether students are already good writers.

The main idea I took from this conversation is that students do not need less support. They need support that leaves room for discovery.

They need opportunities to notice, connect, select, arrange, revise, and create before every important decision has been made for them.

As Wes said near the end of our conversation:

“Whatever you give them, give them ways of being.”

That may be one of the most useful ideas to carry into the new school year.

Give students a clear purpose. Give them examples. Give them possible approaches. Give them room to make decisions. Then help them shape those decisions into something meaningful.

I’m grateful to Wes Phillipson for joining me for this first Learning to Learn Well video conversation. You can learn more about his book, *Teaching the Anti-Essay: 18 Creative Nonfiction Essay Prompts for the English Classroom, and I’ll tag Wes directly here in the post.

If you are planning lessons that help students make their own thinking visible before, during, and after the writing process, you can also explore the CARE AI-Ready Classroom Starter Kit.

CARE provides a flexible process for helping students clarify their purpose, articulate their initial thinking, refine their ideas, and execute meaningful work—without requiring every student to produce the same kind of final product.