The Virginia Tech guidelines weren't issued because of primness, but because of the events of April 16, 2007 when a student, Cho Seung-hui, opened fire on campus, killing 33 people, including himself. It emerged that the projects he had delivered in his playwriting class were full of verbal and physical violence.

Maybe the journey to Cho's shootings didn't begin with his writing. Maybe being taken out of his class and given solo tutoring because other students found his work too threatening was an isolating act that helped turn him into a lone killer.

Maybe, as the Washington Post reported, his poetry teacher telling him he would have to drop out of her class if he didn't change the type of poems he was writing pushed him closer to picking up the gun. And maybe the insistence, from another teacher, that he "write with another voice" was one more step in his transformation from an apparently troubled youth to a mass murderer.

Of course, encouraging students to write about violence in a habitual and lazy way would be wrong. There have been as many shallow, brutal plays on the British stage as there have been urgent, important ones. We have to be wary of violence as fashion.

But to discourage all such writing is to curb a natural response to the world around us. Young people are sensitive to the inequalities of our society, to the daily reports of the Iraq War and its futile violence.

This will surely find its way into their work. We cannot tell them that only grown-up writers can use brutal words and imagery. Those of us working with young writers can help them to craft and contextualize violence, but we mustn't ask them to repress it. This would only increase any capacity for instability and lashing out. It would stand as much chance of causing as it would of preventing future shootings.

(China Daily via agencies April 30, 2008)