Dave Kemper has been a Contributing Partner with Write Source since 1986. He has co-authored the complete line of Write Source handbooks and writing texts. In addition to his editorial work, Dave has presented at national writing conventions and has conducted writing workshops across the country. His latest project is writing weekly blog entries for UpWrite Press, Write Source’s sibling company, in which he explores a variety of business-writing topics. Prior to his work with Write Source, Dave taught literature and writing for eleven years.
At the beginning of Seeking Diversity, author Linda Rief recalls sharing an editorial with her students. One of her students wanted to know where he could send his response to the opinion piece. Rief had to tell the young man that he couldn’t send it because the editorial was several years old. As she states, “It was just an exercise to get you to write a persuasive piece.” The student replied that he had never heard of anything so stupid; he wanted the editor to read his response. From then on Rief “concentrated on making the writing [in her class] real—for genuine purposes. Not simply a ’stupid’ exercise.”
If your students seem to go through the motionswhen they write, perhaps you need to make your assignments more authentic, just as Linda Rief did. This blog will show you how.
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“Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I’d say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.”
—William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well
Many of America’s best writers—from Mark Twain on—write in a relaxed, somewhat informal style. This style is characterized by four special types of sentences. (more…)
I remember very well a vocabulary unit I had planned. I had gathered all kinds of interesting information about words, including how words are added to the language, how their usage changes over time, and so on. I enjoyed every minute of my research and couldn’t wait to share my findings with the students. Unfortunately, they didn’t share in my enthusiasm, no matter what I tried. I might just as well have given them a list of ten words and told them to define each one and use it in a sentence.
I was…just another textbook.…
Why didn’t they share in my enthusiasm? Why weren’t they curious about the words they use? I didn’t have any meaningful answers at the time (so many years ago), but I do now. Everything in the unit came from me. I was, in a sense, just another textbook, presenting a set of facts and details for students to learn. When instruction becomes too teacher-directed or too curriculum-directed, most students will either passively follow along, or they will simply tune out. This is especially true for middle-school and high-school students, who are ready for more direct involvement in the development of the coursework.
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A recent PBS documentary about China began with these words boldly appearing on the screen:
By three methods, we may learn wisdom:
First, by reflection, which is noblest;
Second, by imitation, which is easiest;
And third, by experience, which is the bitterest.
—Confucius
The documentary focuses on the rapid modernization that China has experienced and will continue to pursue. Confucius’s words serve as an effective guidepost when attempting to come to terms with the new China: We can reflect upon changes in the country, perhaps compare China’s situation with similar situations, see what unfolds because of the changes, and so on.
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“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”
—Malcolm S. Forbes
I’m big on student-centered learning. That’s why I’m such a strong proponent of using the workshop approach to help students develop their writing skills. (See my blog entry “Writing Workshops: The Only Way to Go.”) This past week I read an encouraging post, “Teaching Without a Script,” on the New York Times‘ Lesson Plans blog. In that essay, Matthew Kay describes his teaching experience at the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in downtown Philadelphia, and, as he puts it, things are so good that teachers and students are reluctant to leave at the end of the school day:
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“Don’t say the old lady screamed—bring her on and let her scream.”
—Mark Twain
Be more specific. Give me an example. Show, don’t tell. How often does a writing teacher write or state these words during the school year? Too many times to count, right? We’ve heard of teachers who have had special stamps made because they’ve become so tired of writing “Give me an example” on student papers. The problem is, of course, that students too often state general idea after general idea in their writing without incorporating specific examples to support their generalizations.
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The National Writing Project (NWP) has caught my attention again. In my last blog entry, “Writing to Learn Revisited…Again,” I expressed my concern (alarm?) about an Education Week article discussing a writing-to-learn workshop for teachers in Oakland, California. As I stated, writing to learn has been around forever, and I thought it was pretty much a standard teaching strategy known about and used by most teachers. I also called NWP’s effectiveness into question since they are still spreading the word about writing to learn, some 20 or 30 years after it was first introduced.
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Education Week published an online article called “Writing to Learn” on August 27. Since I write about writing, and believe strongly in writing as a learning tool, I was interested in what the article had to say. My guess was that it would explain that writing to learn is a common strategy used in today’s classrooms—and that it is proving to be an effective learning tool for students.
After all, “writing to learn” has been around a long time—at least 30 years. I came across the concept more than 20 years ago in a local workshop, and I still have my well-worn copy of Roots in the Sawdust: Writing to Learn Across the Disciplines (copyright 1985). We’ve included writing-to-learn strategies in our writing handbooks, starting with Writers INC, ever since the late 80s.
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Writing is essentially a solitary act wherein writers put their fingers to the keyboard or pen to paper to create something that is truly their own. But writing should also be a communal or shared activity. Most writers, in fact, do their best work when they have the support of their peers. As educators Dan Kirby and Tom Liner state in their book Inside Out, “…learners and writers need to construct personal versions of the world around them, but then they also need to submit those unique versions to peers for response, negotiation, and confirmation.”
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I started teaching middle school language arts at the tender age of 22. A few years later, I started teaching high school English. I went straight from being a student in one classroom to being a teacher in another one.
The only real-life experiences I had were my summer jobs: washing dishes and working in two foundries. To be sure, these were enlightening experiences, especially working in the foundries, but I worked for only a few months at a time and then returned to the shelter of school life. Nothing else had happened in my life—serious illnesses, sudden hardships, family breakups—that would have forced me to grow up. I would guess that some of my students were significantly more life-hardened than I was.
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