Why not writing?

Writing is one of the skills we learn when we are in school. Unfortunately, not many students are very fond of it. Consequently, they have difficulty in expressing themselves through writing. Others don´t even know how to start. I remember that when I was a high school student, I enjoyed my writing classes. I would spend hours trying to find the right words for every story that I wrote. That´s right, I was very careful when writing. I would make use of my dictionary everytime I was not sure about a word. I remember getting excellent grades on my papers, too. All the effort paid off. I´m not afraid of writing and I´m not a lazy writer either. For this reason, I am worried sometimes when I see that my students don´t want or don´t like to write. Whenever I assign homework, the exercises that require crossing out or checking, or making an X or filling in the blanks are all done but the ones that require writing are not. Why is that? There is something I have learned during all these years. We only learn to do something by doing it. If students don´t write, they will never learn to write. Of course I´m talking about formal writing, compositions, contextualized sentences , etc... Students do write, they write emails to friends, they text messages on their cell phones, that´s true, but what about school? I hope, from the bottom of my heart, that someday my students enjoy writing as much as I do. I also hope that this blog thing helps me to achieve that.