25. 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with the Northwest Inland Writing Project (Idaho), asks her university students to find a literary or historical reference or a personal narrative that can provide a fresh way into and out of their writing, surrounding it much like a window frame surrounds a glass pane.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.
26. 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. "I Am the Comma Splice Queen," The Voice (9) 1.
27. Think like a football coach.
In addition to his work as a high school teacher of writing, Dan Holt, a co-director with 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. 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 School Yearbook: A Guide to Writing and Teaching." The Voice (6) 3.
29. 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. Introduce multi-genre 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
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.