National Writing Project

NATIONAL WRITING PROJECT

University of California
2105 Bancroft Way #1042
Berkeley, California 94720-1042
tel 510.642.0963
fax 510.642.4545
[email protected]
www.writingproject.org
30
Ideas for Teaching Writing
 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Teaching students to write well is one of the most challenging tasks in education.
Writing itself is complex, often disorderly, and frequently frustrating. When
teachers compare notes and approaches, they invariably conclude that they
need more than a fixed or single approach to teach writing, particularly if they
are to address the needs of all students.

Since 1974, more than two million teachers have enriched their writing
classrooms by participating in National Writing Project (NWP) programs.
NWP summer institutes and school-year workshops are among the only places
where teachers can develop as writers and writing teachers.

The NWP believes that teachers are professionals who have important
knowledge to share. The ideas presented here come from the classrooms of
32 writing project teachers and are intended to help students become more
proficient writers and take more pleasure in writing. These ideas originated
as full-length articles in NWP publications and are available online at www.
writingproject.org

To find a writing project site near you, visit www.writingproject.org email

[email protected], or call our national office at 510-642-0963.
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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Use the shared events of students’ lives to inspire writing.

D EBBIE R OTKOW , a co-director of the Coastal Georgia Writing Project,

makes use of the real-life circumstances of her first grade students to help them
compose writing that, in Frank Smith’s words, is “natural and purposeful.”

When a child comes to school with a fresh haircut or a tattered book bag,
these events can inspire a poem. When Michael rode his bike without training
wheels for the first time, this occasion provided a worthwhile topic to write
about. A new baby in a family, a lost tooth, and the death of one student’s
father were the playful or serious inspirations for student writing.

Says Rotkow: “Our classroom reverberated with the stories of our lives as we
wrote, talked, and reflected about who we were, what we did, what we thought,
and how we thought about it. We became a community.”

ROTKOW, DEBBIE. “Two or Three Things I Know For Sure About Helping Students Write
the Stories of Their Lives.” The Quarterly (25) 4.
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National Writing Project

Establish an email dialogue between students from different

schools who are reading the same book.

When high school teacher KAREN MURAR and college instructor ELAINE WARE,
teacher-consultants with the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project,
discovered students were scheduled to read the August Wilson play Fences at
the same time, they set up email communication between students to allow
some “teacherless talk” about the text.

Rather than typical teacher-led discussion, the project fostered independent

conversation between students. Formal classroom discussion of the play did
not occur until students had completed all email correspondence. Though
teachers were not involved in student online dialogues, the conversations
evidenced the same reading strategies promoted in teacher-led discussion,
including predication, clarification, interpretation, and others.

MURAR, KAREN, and ELAINE WARE. 1998. “Teacherless Talk: Impressions from Electronic
Literacy Conversations.” The Quarterly (20) 3.
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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Use writing to improve relations among students.

DIANE WAFF, co-director of the Philadelphia Writing Project, taught in an

urban school where boys outnumbered girls four to one in her classroom. The
situation left girls feeling overwhelmed, according to Waff, and their “voices
faded into the background, overpowered by more aggressive male voices.”

Determined not to ignore this unhealthy situation, Waff urged students to face
the problem head-on, asking them to write about gender-based problems in their
journals. She then introduced literature that considered relationships between
the sexes, focusing on themes of romance, love, and marriage. Students wrote
in response to works as diverse as de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and Dean
Myers’s Motown and DiDi.

In the beginning there was a great dissonance between male and female
responses. According to Waff, “Girls focused on feelings; boys focused on sex,
money, and the fleeting nature of romantic attachment.” But as the students
continued to write about and discuss their honest feelings, they began to notice
that they had similar ideas on many issues. “By confronting these gender-based
problems directly,” says Waff, “the effect was to improve the lives of individual
students and the social well-being of the wider school community.”

WAFF, DIANE. 1995. “Romance in the Classroom: Inviting Discourse on Gender and
Power.” The Quarterly (17) 2.
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National Writing Project

Help student writers draw rich chunks of writing from

endless sprawl.

JAN MATSUOKA, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project

(California), describes a revision conference she held with a third grade English
language learner named Sandee, who had written about a recent trip to Los
Angeles.

“I told her I wanted her story to have more focus,” writes Matsuoka. “I could
tell she was confused so I made rough sketches representing the events of her
trip. I made a small frame out of a piece of paper and placed it down on one of
her drawings—a sketch she had made of a visit with her grandmother.”

“Focus, I told her, means writing about the memorable details of the visit with
your grandmother, not everything else you did on the trip.”

“‘Oh, I get it,’ Sandee smiled, ‘like just one cartoon, not a whole bunch.’”

Sandee’s next draft was more deep than broad.

MATSUOKA, JAN. 1998. “Revising Revision: How My Students Transformed Writers’

Workshop.” The Quarterly (20) 1.
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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Work with words relevant to students’ lives to help them

build vocabulary.

EILEEN SIMMONS, a teacher-consultant with the Oklahoma State University

Writing Project, knows that the more relevant new words are to students’
lives, the more likely they are to take hold.

In her high school classroom, she uses a form of the children’s ABC book as a
community-building project. For each letter of the alphabet, the students find
an appropriately descriptive word for themselves. Students elaborate on the
word by writing sentences and creating an illustration. In the process, they
make extensive use of the dictionary and thesaurus.

One student describes her personality as sometimes ‘caustic,’ illustrating the

word with a photograph of a burning car in a war zone. Her caption explains
that she understands the hurt her ‘burning’ sarcastic remarks can generate.

SIMMONS, EILEEN. 2002. “Visualizing Vocabulary.” The Quarterly (24) 3.

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National Writing Project

Help students analyze text by asking them to imagine dialogue

between authors.

JOHN LEVINE, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project

(California), helps his college freshmen integrate the ideas of several writers
into a single analytical essay by asking them to create a dialogue among those
writers.

He tells his students, for instance, “imagine you are the moderator of a panel
discussion on the topic these writers are discussing. Consider the three writers
and construct a dialogue among the four ‘voices’ (the three essayists plus
you).”

Levine tells students to format the dialogue as though it were a script. The
essay follows from this preparation.

LEVINE, JOHN. 2002. “Talking Texts: Writing Dialogue in the College Composition
Classroom.” The Quarterly (24) 2.
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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Spotlight language and use group brainstorming to help students

create poetry.

The following is a group poem created by second grade students of MICHELLE

FLEER, a teacher-consultant with the Dakota Writing Project (South
Dakota).
Underwater
Crabs crawl patiently along the ocean floor
searching for prey.
Fish soundlessly weave their way through
slippery seaweed
Whales whisper to others as they slide
through the salty water.
And silent waves wash into a dark cave
where an octopus is sleeping.

Fleer helped her students get started by finding a familiar topic. (In this case her
students had been studying sea life.) She asked them to brainstorm language
related to the sea, allowing them time to list appropriate nouns, verbs, and
adjectives. The students then used these words to create phrases and used the
phrases to produce the poem itself.

As a group, students put together words in ways Fleer didn’t believe many of
them could have done if they were working on their own, and after creating
several group poems, some students felt confident enough to work alone.

FLEER, MICHELLE. 2002. “Beyond ‘Pink is a Rose.’” The Quarterly (24) 4.

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National Writing Project

Ask students to reflect on and write about their writing.

DOUGLAS JAMES JOYCE, a teacher-consultant with the Denver Writing Project,

makes use of what he calls “metawriting” in his college writing classes. He sees
metawriting (writing about writing) as a way to help students reduce errors in
their academic prose.

Joyce explains one metawriting strategy: After reading each essay, he selects
one error that occurs frequently in a student’s work and points out each
instance in which the error is made. He instructs the student to write a one-
page essay, comparing and contrasting three sources that provide guidance
on the established use of that particular convention, making sure a variety of
sources are available.

“I want the student to dig into the topic as deeply as necessary, to come away
with a thorough understanding of the how and why of the usage, and to
understand any debate that may surround the particular usage.”

JOYCE, DOUGLAS JAMES. 2002. “On the Use of Metawriting to Learn Grammar and
Mechanics.” The Quarterly (24) 4.
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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Ease into writing workshops by presenting yourself as a model.

GLORIANNE BRADSHAW, a teacher-consultant with the Red River Valley Writing

Project (North Dakota), decided to make use of experiences from her own life
when teaching her first-graders how to write.
For example, on an overhead transparency she shows a sketch of herself stirring
cookie batter while on vacation. She writes the phrase ‘made cookies’ under
the sketch. Then she asks students to help her write a sentence about this. She
writes the words who, where, and when. Using these words as prompts, she
and the students construct the sentence, “I made cookies in the kitchen in the
morning.”
Next, each student returns to the sketch he or she has made of a summer
vacation activity and, with her help, answers the same questions answered for
Bradshaw’s drawing. Then she asks them, “Tell me more. Do the cookies have
chocolate chips? Does the pizza have pepperoni?” These facts lead to other
sentences.
Rather than taking away creativity, Bradshaw believes this kind of structure
gives students a helpful format for creativity.

BRADSHAW, GLORIANNE. 2001. “Back to Square One: What to Do When Writing Workshop
Just Doesn’t Work.” The Quarterly (23) 1.
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National Writing Project

Get students to focus on their writing by holding off on grading.

STEPHANIE WILDER found that the grades she gave her high school students
were getting in the way of their progress. The weaker students stopped trying.
Other students relied on grades as the only standard by which they judged
their own work.

“I decided to postpone my grading until the portfolios, which contained

a selection of student work, were complete,” Wilder says. She continued to
comment on papers, encourage revision, and urge students to meet with her
for conferences. But she waited to grade the papers.

It took a while for students to stop leafing to the ends of their papers in search of
a grade, and there was some grumbling from students who had always received
excellent grades. But she believes that because she was less quick to judge their
work, students were better able to evaluate their efforts themselves.

WILDER, STEPHANIE. 1997. “Pruning Too Early: The Thorny Issue of Grading Student
Writing.” The Quarterly (19) 4.
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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Use casual talk about students’ lives to generate writing.

ERIN (PIRNOT) CICCONE, teacher-consultant with the Pennsylvania Writing

and Literature Project, found a way to make more productive the “Monday
morning gab fest” she used as a warm-up with her fifth grade students. She
conceived of “Headline News.” As students entered the classroom on Monday
mornings, they wrote personal headlines about their weekends and posted
them on the bulletin board. A headline might read “Fifth-Grader Stranded at
Movie Theatre” or “Girl Takes on Responsibility as Mother’s Helper.”

After the headlines had been posted, students had a chance to guess the stories
behind them. The writers then told the stories behind their headlines. As each
student had only three minutes to talk, they needed to make decisions about
what was important and to clarify details as they proceeded. They began to
rely on suspense and “purposeful ambiguity” to hold listeners’ interest.

On Tuesday, students committed their stories to writing. Because of the

“Headline News” experience, Ciccone’s students have been able to generate
writing that is focused, detailed, and well ordered.

CICCONE, ERIN (PIRNOT). 2001. “A Place for Talk in Writers’ Workshop.” The Quarterly
(23) 4.
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National Writing Project

Give students a chance to write to an audience for real purpose.

PATRICIA A. SLAGLE, high school teacher and teacher-consultant with the

Louisville Writing Project (Kentucky), understands the difference between
writing for a hypothetical purpose and writing to an audience for real purpose.
She illustrates the difference by contrasting two assignments.

She began with: “Imagine you are the drama critic for your local newspaper.
Write a review of an imaginary production of the play we have just finished
studying in class.” This prompt asks students to assume the contrived role of
a professional writer and drama critic. They must adapt to a voice that is not
theirs and pretend to have knowledge they do not have.

Slagle developed a more effective alternative: “Write a letter to the director of

your local theater company in which you present arguments for producing
the play that we have just finished studying in class.” This prompt, Slagle
says, allows the writer her own voice, building into her argument concrete
references to personal experience. “Of course,” adds Slagle, “this prompt would
constitute authentic writing only for those students who, in fact, would like to
see the play produced.”

SLAGLE, PATRICIA A. 1997. “Getting Real: Authenticity in Writing Prompts.” The Quarterly
(19) 3.
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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Practice and play with revision techniques.

MARK FARRINGTON, college instructor and teacher-consultant with the Northern

Virginia Writing Project, believes teaching revision sometimes means
practicing techniques of revision. An exercise like “find a place other than
the first sentence where this essay might begin” is valuable because it shows
student writers the possibilities that exist in writing.

For Farrington’s students, practice can sometime turn to play with directions
to:
• add five colors
• add four action verbs
• add one metaphor
• add five sensory details.
In his college fiction writing class, Farrington asks students to choose a spot in
the story where the main character does something that is crucial to the rest
of the story. At that moment, Farrington says, they must make the character
do the exact opposite.

“Playing at revision can lead to insightful surprises,” Farrington says. “When

they come, revision doesn’t seem such hard work anymore.”

FARRINGTON, MARK. 1999. “Four Principles Toward Teaching the Craft of Revision.” The
Quarterly (21) 2.
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National Writing Project

Pair students with adult reading/writing buddies.

BERNADETTE LAMBERT, teacher-consultant with the Kennesaw Mountain

Writing Project (Georgia), wondered what would happen if she had her sixth
grade students pair with an adult family member to read a book. She asked the
students about the kinds of books they wanted to read (mysteries, adventure,
ghost stories) and the adults about the kinds of books they wanted to read
with the young people (character-building values, multiculturalism, no ghost
stories). Using these suggestions for direction, Lambert developed a list of
30 books. From this list, each student-adult pair chose one. They committed
themselves to read and discuss the book and write separate reviews.

Most of the students, says Lambert, were proud to share a piece of writing
done by their adult reading buddy. Several admitted that they had never before
had this level of intellectual conversation with an adult family member.

LAMBERT, BERNADETTE. 1999. “You and Me and a Book Makes Three.” The Quarterly
(21) 3.
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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Teach “tension” to move students beyond fluency.

SUZANNE LINEBARGER, a co-director of the Northern California Writing Project,

recognized that one element lacking from many of her students’ stories was
tension. One day, in front of the class, she demonstrated tension with a rubber
band. Looped over her finger, the rubber band merely dangled. “However,”
she told the students, “when I stretch it out and point it (not at a student), the
rubber band suddenly becomes more interesting. It’s the tension, the potential
energy, that rivets your attention. It’s the same in writing.”

Linebarger revised a generic writing prompt to add an element of tension.

The initial prompt read, “Think of a friend who is special to you. Write about
something your friend has done for you, you have done for your friend, or you
have done together.”

Linebarger didn’t want responses that settled for “my best friend was really
good to me,” so “during the rewrite session we talked about how hard it is to
stay friends when met with a challenge. Students talked about times they had
let their friends down or times their friends had let them down, and how they
had managed to stay friends in spite of their problems. In other words, we
talked about some tense situations that found their way into their writing.”

LINEBARGER, SUZANNE. 2001. “Tensing Up: Moving From Fluency to Flair.” The Quarterly
(23) 3.
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National Writing Project

Encourage descriptive writing by focusing on the sounds

of words.

RAY SKJELBRED, middle school teacher at Marin Country Day School, wants
his seventh grade students to listen to language. He wants to begin to train
their ears by asking them to make lists of wonderful sounding words. “This
is strictly a listening game,” says Skjelbred. “They shouldn’t write lunch just
because they’re hungry.” When the collective list is assembled, Skjelbred asks
students to make sentences from some of the words they’ve collected. They
may use their own words, borrow from other contributors, add other words as
necessary, and change word forms.

Among the words on one student’s list: tumble, detergent, sift, bubble, syllable,
creep, erupt, and volcano. The student writes:
• A man loads his laundry into the tumbling washer, the detergent sifting
through the bubbling water.
• The syllables creep through her teeth.
• The fog erupts like a volcano in the dust.

“Unexpected words can go together, creating amazing images,” says

Skjelbred.

SKJELBRED, RAY. 1997. “Sound and Sense: Grammar, Poetry, and Creative Language.”
The Quarterly (19) 4.
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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Require written response to peers’ writing.

KATHLEEN O’SHAUGHNESSY, a co-director of the National Writing Project of

Acadiana (Louisiana), asks her middle school students to respond to each
others’ writing on Post-it Notes. Students attach their comments to a piece of
writing under consideration.

“I’ve found that when I require a written response on a Post-it instead of

merely allowing students to respond verbally, the responders take their duties
more seriously and, with practice, the quality of their remarks improves.” One
student wrote:
While I was reading your piece, I felt like I was riding a roller coaster. It started
out kinda slow, but you could tell there was something exciting coming up. But
then it moved real fast and stopped all of a sudden. I almost needed to read it
again the way you ride a roller coaster over again because it goes too fast.

Says O’Shaughnessy, “This response is certainly more useful to the writer than
the usual ‘I think you could, like, add some more details, you know?’ that I
often overheard in response meetings.”

O’SHAUGHNESSY, KATHLEEN. 2001. “Everything I Know About Teaching Language Arts, I

Learned at the Office Supply Store.” The Quarterly (23) 2.
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National Writing Project

Make writing reflection tangible.

ANNA COLLINS TREST, director of the South Mississippi Writing Project,

finds she can lead upper elementary school students to better understand the
concept of “reflection” if she anchors the discussion in the concrete and helps
students establish categories for their reflective responses.
She decided to use mirrors to teach the reflective process. Each student had
one. As the students gazed at their own reflections, she asked this question:
“What can you think about while looking in the mirror at your own reflection?”
As they answered, she categorized each response:
I think I’m a queen—pretending/imagining
I look at my cavities—examining/observing
I think I’m having a bad hair day—forming opinions
What will I look like when I am old?—questioning
My hair is parted in the middle—describing
I’m thinking about when I broke my nose—remembering
I think I look better than my brother—comparing
Everything on my face looks sad today—expressing emotion.

Trest talked with students about the categories and invited them to give
personal examples of each. Then she asked them to look in the mirrors again,
reflect on their images, and write.
“Elementary students are literal in their thinking,” Trest says, “but that doesn’t
mean they can’t be creative.”

TREST, ANNA COLLINS. 1999. “I Was a Journal Topic Junkie.” The Quarterly (21) 4.
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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Make grammar instruction dynamic.

PHILIP IRELAND, teacher-consultant with the San Marcos Writing Project

(California), believes in active learning. One of his strategies has been to
take his seventh-graders on a “preposition walk” around the school campus.
Walking in pairs, they tell each other what they are doing:
I’m stepping off the grass.
I’m talking to my friend.
“Students soon discover that everything they do contains prepositional phrases.
I walk among my students prompting answers,” Ireland explains.

“I’m crawling under the tennis net,” Amanda proclaims from her hands and
knees. “The prepositional phrase is under the net.”

“The preposition?” I ask.

“Under.”

IRELAND, PHILIP. 2003. “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.” The Quarterly (25) 3.
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National Writing Project

Ask students to experiment with sentence length.

KIM STAFFORD, director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis and Clark
College, wants his students to discard old notions that sentences should be a
certain length. He explains to his students that a writer’s command of long and
short sentences makes for a “more pliable” writing repertoire. He describes the
exercise he uses to help students experiment with sentence length.

“I invite writers to compose a sentence that goes on for at least a page—and

no fair cheating with a semicolon. Just use ‘and’ when you have to, or a dash,
or make a list, and keep it going.” After years of being told not to, they take
pleasure in writing the greatest run-on sentences they can.

“Then we shake out our writing hands, take a blank page, and write from the
upper left to the lower right corner again, but this time letting no sentence be
longer than four words, but every sentence must have a subject and a verb.”

Stafford compares the first style of sentence construction to a river and the
second to a drum. “Writers need both,” he says. “Rivers have long rhythms.
Drums roll.”

STAFFORD, KIM. 2003. “Sentence as River and as Drum.” The Quarterly (25) 3.
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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Help students ask questions about their writing.

JONI CHANCER, teacher-consultant of the South Coast Writing Project

(California), has paid a lot of attention to the type of questions she wants
her upper elementary students to consider as they re-examine their writing,
reflecting on pieces they may make part of their portfolios. Here are some of
the questions:

Why did I write this piece? Where did I get my ideas?

Who is the audience and how did it affect this piece?
What skills did I work on in this piece?
Was this piece easy or difficult to write? Why?
What parts did I rework? What were my revisions?
Did I try something new?
What skills did I work on in this piece?
What elements of writer’s craft enhanced my story?
What might I change?
Did something I read influence my writing?
What did I learn or what did I expect the reader to learn?
Where will I go from here? Will I publish it? Share it? Expand it? Toss it? File it?

Chancer cautions that these questions should not be considered a “reflection

checklist,” rather they are questions that seem to be addressed frequently when
writers tell the story of a particular piece.
CHANCER, JONI. 2001. “The Teacher’s Role in Portfolio Assessment.” In The Whole Story:
Teachers Talk About Portfolios, edited by Mary Ann Smith and Jane Juska. Berkeley,
California: National Writing Project.
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National Writing Project

Challenge students to find active verbs.

NANCY LILLY, co-director of the Greater New Orleans Writing Project, wanted
her fourth and fifth grade students to breathe life into their nonfiction writing.
She thought the student who wrote this paragraph could do better:
The jaguar is the biggest and strongest cat in the rainforest. The jaguar’s jaw is strong
enough to crush a turtle’s shell. Jaguars also have very powerful legs for leaping from
branch to branch to chase prey.
Building on an idea from Stephanie Harvey (Nonfiction Matters, Stenhouse,
1998) Lilly introduced the concept of “nouns as stuff” and verbs as “what stuff
does.”
In a brainstorming session related to the students’ study of the rain forest, the
class supplied the following assistance to the writer:
Stuff/Nouns What Stuff Does/Verbs
jaguar leaps, pounces
jaguar’s legs pump
jaguar’s teeth crush
jaguar’s mouth devours
This was just the help the writer needed to create the following revised
paragraph:
As the sun disappears from the heart of the forest, the jaguar leaps through the
underbrush, pumping its powerful legs. It spies a gharial gliding down the river. The
jungle cat pounces, crushing the turtle with his teeth, devouring the reptile with pleasure.

LILLY, NANCY. “Dead or Alive: How Will Your Students’ Nonfiction Writing Arrive?”
The Quarterly (25) 4.
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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Require students to make a persuasive written argument in

support of a final grade.

For a final exam, SARAH LORENZ, a teacher-consultant with the Eastern

Michigan Writing Project, asks her high school students to make a written
argument for the grade they think they should receive. Drawing on work they
have done over the semester, students make a case for how much they have
learned in the writing class.

“The key to convincing me,” says Lorenz, “is the use of detail. They can’t simply
say they have improved as writers—they have to give examples and even quote
their own writing…They can’t just say something was helpful—they have to
tell me why they thought it was important, how their thinking changed, or how
they applied this learning to everyday life.”

LORENZ, SARAH. 2001. “Beyond Rhetoric: A Reflective Persuasive Final Exam for the
Writing Classroom.” The Quarterly (23) 4.
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National Writing Project

Ground writing in social issues important to students.

JEAN HICKS, director, and TIM JOHNSON, a co-director, both of the Louisville
Writing Project (Kentucky), have developed a way to help high school students
create brief, effective dramas about issues in their lives. The class, working
in groups, decides on a theme such as jealousy, sibling rivalry, competition,
or teen drinking. Each group develops a scene illustrating an aspect of this
chosen theme.

Considering the theme of sibling rivalry, for instance, students identify possible
scenes with topics such as “I Had It First” (competing for family resources)
and “Calling in the Troops” (tattling). Students then set up the circumstances
and characters.

Hicks and Johnson give each of the “characters” a different color packet of Post-
it Notes. Each student develops and posts dialogue for his or her character. As
the scene emerges, Post-its can be added, moved, and deleted. They remind
students of the conventions of drama such as conflict and resolution. Scenes,
when acted out, are limited to 10 minutes.

“It’s not so much about the genre or the product as it is about creating a culture
that supports the thinking and learning of writers,” write Hicks and Johnson.

HICKS, JEAN and TIM JOHNSON. 2000. “Staging Learning: The Play’s the Thing.” The
Quarterly (22) 3.
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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Encourage the “framing device” as an aid to cohesion in writing.

ROMANA HILLEBRAND, a teacher-consultant with the Northwest Inland Writing

Project (Idaho), asks her university students to find a literary or historical
reference or a personal narrative that can provide a fresh way into and out
of their writing, surrounding it much like a window frame surrounds a glass
pane.

Hillebrand provides this example:

A student in her research class wrote a paper on the relationship between

humans and plants, beginning with a reference to the nursery rhyme, ‘Ring
around the rosy, a pocket full of posies…’ She explained the rhymes as
originating with the practice of masking the stench of death with flowers
during the Black Plague. The student finished the paper with the sentence,
“Without plants, life on Earth would cease to exist as we know it; ashes, ashes
we all fall down.”

Hillebrand concludes that linking the introduction and the conclusion helps
unify a paper and satisfy the reader.

HILLEBRAND, ROMANA. 2001. “It’s a Frame Up: Helping Students Devise Beginning and
Endings.”The Quarterly (23) 1.
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National Writing Project

Use real world examples to reinforce writing conventions.

SUZANNE CHERRY, director of the Swamp Fox Writing Project (South Carolina),
has her own way of dramatizing the comma splice error. She brings to class
two pieces of wire, the last inch of each exposed. She tells her college students
“We need to join these pieces of wire together right now if we are to be able
to watch our favorite TV show. What can we do? We could use some tape, but
that would probably be a mistake as the puppy could easily eat through the
connection. By splicing the wires in this way, we are creating a fire hazard.”

A better connection, the students usually suggest, would be to use one of those
electrical connectors that look like pen caps.

“Now,” Cherry says (often to the accompaniment of multiple groans), “let’s turn
these wires into sentences. If we simply splice them together with a comma,
the equivalent of a piece of tape, we create a weak connection, or a comma
splice error. What then would be the grammatical equivalent of the electrical
connector? Think conjunction—and, but, or. Or try a semicolon. All of these
show relationships between sentences in a way that the comma, a device for
taping clauses together in a slapdash manner, does not.”

“I’ve been teaching writing for many years,” Cherry says. “And I now realize
the more able we are to relate the concepts of writing to ‘real world’ experience,
the more successful we will be.”

CHERRY, SUZANNE. 2004. “Keeping the Comma Splice Queen Happy.” The Voice
(9) 1.
 27
30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Think like a football coach.

In addition to his work as a high school teacher of writing, DAN HOLT, a co-
director of the Third Coast Writing Project (Michigan), spent 20 years
coaching football. While doing the latter, he learned quite a bit about doing
the former. Here is some of what he found out:
The writing teacher can’t stay on the sidelines. “When I modeled for my players,
they knew what I wanted them to do.” The same involvement, he says, is
required to successfully teach writing.
Like the coach, the writing teacher should praise strong performance rather than
focus on the negative. Statements such as “Wow, that was a killer block,” or
“That paragraph was tight” will turn “butterball” ninth-grade boys into varsity
linemen and insecure adolescents into aspiring poets.
The writing teacher should apply the KISS theory: Keep it simple stupid. Holt
explains for a freshman quarterback, audibles (on-field commands) are best
used with care until a player has reached a higher skill level. In writing class,
a student who has never written a poem needs to start with small verse forms
such as a chinquapin or haiku.
Practice and routine are important both for football players and for writing
students, but football players and writers also need the “adrenaline rush” of
the big game and the final draft.

HOLT, DAN. 1999. “What Coaching Football Taught Me About Teaching Writing.” The
Voice (4) 3.
28
National Writing Project

Allow classroom writing to take a page from yearbook writing.

High school teacher JON APPLEBY noticed that when yearbooks fell into
students’ hands “my curriculum got dropped in a heartbeat for spirited words
scribbled over photos.” Appleby wondered, “How can I make my classroom as
fascinating and consuming as the yearbook?”

Here are some ideas that yearbook writing inspired:

Take pictures, put them on the bulletin boards, and have students write
captions for them. Then design small descriptive writing assignments using
the photographs of events such as the prom and homecoming. Afterwards, ask
students to choose quotes from things they have read that represent what they
feel and think and put them on the walls.

Check in about students’ lives. Recognize achievements and individuals the

way that yearbook writers direct attention to each other. Ask students to write
down memories and simply, joyfully share them. As yearbook writing usually
does, insist on a sense of tomorrow.

APPLEBY, JON. 2001. “The Student Yearbook: A Guide to Writing and Teaching.” The
Voice (6) 3.
 29
30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Use home language on the road to Standard English.

EILEEN KENNEDY, special education teacher at Medger Evers College, works with
native speakers of Caribbean Creole who are preparing to teach in New York
City. Sometimes she encourages these students to draft writing in their native
Creole. The additional challenge becomes to re-draft this writing, rendered in
patois, into Standard English.

She finds that narratives involving immigrant Caribbean natives in unfamiliar

situations—buying a refrigerator, for instance—lead to inspired writing. In
addition, some students expressed their thoughts more proficiently in Standard
English after drafting in their vernaculars.

KENNEDY, EILEEN. 2003. “Writing in Home Dialects: Choosing a Written Discourse in a

Teacher Education Class.” The Quarterly (25) 2.
30
National Writing Project

Introduce multigenre writing in the context of community

service.

JIM WILCOX, teacher-consultant with the Oklahoma Writing Project, requires

his college students to volunteer at a local facility that serves the community,
any place from the Special Olympics to a burn unit. Over the course of
their tenure with the organization, students write in a number of genres: an
objective report that describes the appearance and activity of the facility, a
personal interview/profile, an evaluation essay that requires students to set up
criteria by which to assess this kind of organization, an investigative report
that includes information from a second source, and a letter to the editor of a
campus newspaper or other publication.

Wilcox says, “Besides improving their researching skills, students learn that
their community is indeed full of problems and frustrations. They also learn
that their own talents and time are valuable assets in solving some of the
world’s problems—one life at a time.”

WILCOX, JIM. 2003. “The Spirit of Volunteerism in English Composition.” The Quarterly
(25) 2.
© 2003 by the NATIONAL WRITING PROJECt
All rights reserved
Reprinted 2004

Compiled and edited by ART PETERSON.

Designed by KAREN KARTEN.

3: “Romance in the Classroom: Inviting Discourse on Gender and Power” by

Diane Waff is reprinted from The Voice of the Philadelphia Writing Project (3)
1. Copyright © Winter 1994.

11: “A Place for Talk in Writers’ Workshop” by Erin (Pirnot) Ciccone is

reprinted from The Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project Newsletter (21)
2. Copyright © 2000.

12: A version of “Getting Real: Can a Writing Prompt Be Authentic?” by

Patricia Slagle first appeared in The Louisville Writing Project Network News.

20: “Sentence as River and as Drum” by Kim Stafford is reprinted from The
Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft.
University of Georgia Press: Athens, Georgia. Copyright © 2003 by Kim
Stafford. All rights reserved.

30: “The Spirit of Volunteerism in English Composition” by Jim Wilcox is

reprinted from Write Angles III: Still More Strategies for Teaching Composition.
Copyright © 2002 by the Oklahoma Department of Education.
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Ideas for Teaching Writing