WRITING SKILLS
The Challenge of Writing
Writing is the most difficult skill to develop in young learners. It is complex, requiring the balancing of many different considerations. It is a subtle skill that is difficult to talk about with clarity, making it challenging to help students see the distinctions that make one piece of writing better than another. Because of these issues, developing student writing requires considerable effort and determination. Experience has taught me that the key to helping students progress as writers is simply to require them to write continually; in my classroom, we are always working on a writing project and a considerable body of work is completed over the course of the year.
My Program Has a Proven Record of Developing Skilled Writers
Over the course of my career in independent schools, I have made it one of my highest priorities to create and refine methods to teach students to be skilled writers. I think testimonials about my teaching demonstrate that I have been effective at achieving this goal, and many former students report using my methods for writing through college and into their professional lives. In addition, the writing of my middle school students’ should speak for itself; my students are challenged to write lengthy essays on complex topics and do so at a high level of achievement for their grade level. Please read some of their essays and judge for yourself.
Choosing the Right Audience: A Reader at Your Grade Level
I believe giving students the right audience is one of most impactful ways to develop their writing. It is common for students to assume they are writing their papers for the teacher and many writing programs teach this as well, however, I have found that this is not the best audience for improving their skills. In my class, the students are asked to imagine that all writing assignments are being written for a fellow student of the same age who is not familiar with the material being discussed. The writer’s goal is to teach the material to their fellow student so that he or she can gain an excellent understanding of it. The more clearly and completely the material is explained, the more effectively it will teach the reader, the more successful the writing will be. We succinctly express the objective for all writing done in my class to be to educate the reader thoroughly.
Writing papers for the student reader is a significantly greater challenge than writing for the teacher. My students are tasked with explaining all key terms and concepts that their student readers may not fully understand and to teach the material in an organized and clear way so that they can gain an excellent understanding. When the teacher is the audience, students can assume that their instructor understands key concepts and will be able to fill in holes where explanation is missing or the wording is vague. In my class, students are given a higher, more demanding bar to reach as a writer. When the students are challenged to rise to this higher standard assignment after assignment, with continued practice, they reach increasingly higher levels of success.
The Challenge of Writing
Writing is the most difficult skill to develop in young learners. It is complex, requiring the balancing of many different considerations. It is a subtle skill that is difficult to talk about with clarity, making it challenging to help students see the distinctions that make one piece of writing better than another. Because of these issues, developing student writing requires considerable effort and determination. Experience has taught me that the key to helping students progress as writers is simply to require them to write continually; in my classroom, we are always working on a writing project and a considerable body of work is completed over the course of the year.
My Program Has a Proven Record of Developing Skilled Writers
Over the course of my career in independent schools, I have made it one of my highest priorities to create and refine methods to teach students to be skilled writers. I think testimonials about my teaching demonstrate that I have been effective at achieving this goal, and many former students report using my methods for writing through college and into their professional lives. In addition, the writing of my middle school students’ should speak for itself; my students are challenged to write lengthy essays on complex topics and do so at a high level of achievement for their grade level. Please read some of their essays and judge for yourself.
Choosing the Right Audience: A Reader at Your Grade Level
I believe giving students the right audience is one of most impactful ways to develop their writing. It is common for students to assume they are writing their papers for the teacher and many writing programs teach this as well, however, I have found that this is not the best audience for improving their skills. In my class, the students are asked to imagine that all writing assignments are being written for a fellow student of the same age who is not familiar with the material being discussed. The writer’s goal is to teach the material to their fellow student so that he or she can gain an excellent understanding of it. The more clearly and completely the material is explained, the more effectively it will teach the reader, the more successful the writing will be. We succinctly express the objective for all writing done in my class to be to educate the reader thoroughly.
Writing papers for the student reader is a significantly greater challenge than writing for the teacher. My students are tasked with explaining all key terms and concepts that their student readers may not fully understand and to teach the material in an organized and clear way so that they can gain an excellent understanding. When the teacher is the audience, students can assume that their instructor understands key concepts and will be able to fill in holes where explanation is missing or the wording is vague. In my class, students are given a higher, more demanding bar to reach as a writer. When the students are challenged to rise to this higher standard assignment after assignment, with continued practice, they reach increasingly higher levels of success.
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The Movie-Maker for Writing and Reading: A Mental Image
One of the writing tools my students enjoy the most is the concept of the movie-maker. I invented this metaphor and integrative mental image to help students better conceptualize how language works and see more clearly the effect of their words on their listener or reader. To begin, we discuss how language, either oral or written, is a linear process where one word is followed by one word and then another. Language is unlike visual communication, such as an illustration or a cause and effect flow chart my students build, which are open in all directions and allow the thinking to move freely. In comparison, language feels like a straight jacket for the mind. It is a bobsled chute giving you nothing more to do than to go onward down the single track.
The best way I have found to help my students visualize language is to picture it as a reel of movie film, where a single word is placed on each successive frame of the film. We imagine each word we speak or write as entering into our audience’s ear a single frame and word at a time. As each frame-word enters, it is projected onto the screen of the audience’s mind, which acts like a movie-maker that creates a movie out of the one by one by one flow of words. The movie-maker is programmed by each word in succession and does its best to build a coherent picture show out of the stream of language.
However, at times the movie-maker is challenged to know how the incoming words should be added to the movie being created. A big red flashing question mark pops up onto the screen as the movie-maker struggles to figure out what to do with this new word or phrase and make sense of how it should be integrated into the film. The movie-maker experiences a glitch and pauses. Then, it quickly rewinds and runs the glitching phrase through the sense-making machine again to see if it can better understand it this time. If the movie-maker can’t figure out what to do with the glitching word or phrase, it will just leave the big red flashing question mark where it is in the movie, creating a hole in the understanding of the reader and making the movie pocketed with little confusions that limit its coherence and effectiveness.
To be both a great reader and writer, students need to build a crackerjack movie-maker within themselves. When they read, they need to actively construct from the word-frames a movie in their minds that is vivid, coherent, and complete, that squeezes from the words all of their meanings and deciphers the interrelationships between their parts to build as accurate, detailed, and comprehensive a reconstruction as possible. When a word-frame that holds no meaning for them glitches and pauses the process, they need a movie-maker that will flash red question marks and set off irritable alarms that drive the reader to figure out the meaning from the context clues or turn to a dictionary to see what the word means. They need a movie-maker that is willing to rewind and run that sentence through again, and that can pause and contemplate and generate questions and wonder. They need a movie-maker that is sensitive and ever on the look out for that subtle feeling that maybe it is missing something, that maybe that little root their sense-maker tripped over could lead to some deeper meaning; they need one that is willing to dig and gets its hands dirty to figure things out. When they are guided to the possibility, students build such a movie-maker by working through challenging reading and receiving rigorous feedback on their comprehension that lets them know when they are missing something or not reconstructing their movie of the reading effectively.
As a writer, students learn to turn the movie-maker to their own words and run their writing through the sense-making machine to watch what kind of movie their words do in fact build. They learn to make their movie-maker sensitive to the flow of their words and to be able to identify the exact word-frame where the movie-maker started to glitch and not know what to do. We say in class all of the time, when you run that paragraph through the movie-maker, does it have any glitches? At what word or phrase does it start to beep and throw up some flashing red question marks? Where does the picture start to get fuzzing, making the reader wonder if it means this or if it means that? Students enjoy playing with this metaphor and visual image; it helps to concretize in an engaging way what good readers do and how good writers test to see if their work is effective. It is one of my most dynamic tools for refining students’ understanding of the key skills of reading and writing.
One of the writing tools my students enjoy the most is the concept of the movie-maker. I invented this metaphor and integrative mental image to help students better conceptualize how language works and see more clearly the effect of their words on their listener or reader. To begin, we discuss how language, either oral or written, is a linear process where one word is followed by one word and then another. Language is unlike visual communication, such as an illustration or a cause and effect flow chart my students build, which are open in all directions and allow the thinking to move freely. In comparison, language feels like a straight jacket for the mind. It is a bobsled chute giving you nothing more to do than to go onward down the single track.
The best way I have found to help my students visualize language is to picture it as a reel of movie film, where a single word is placed on each successive frame of the film. We imagine each word we speak or write as entering into our audience’s ear a single frame and word at a time. As each frame-word enters, it is projected onto the screen of the audience’s mind, which acts like a movie-maker that creates a movie out of the one by one by one flow of words. The movie-maker is programmed by each word in succession and does its best to build a coherent picture show out of the stream of language.
However, at times the movie-maker is challenged to know how the incoming words should be added to the movie being created. A big red flashing question mark pops up onto the screen as the movie-maker struggles to figure out what to do with this new word or phrase and make sense of how it should be integrated into the film. The movie-maker experiences a glitch and pauses. Then, it quickly rewinds and runs the glitching phrase through the sense-making machine again to see if it can better understand it this time. If the movie-maker can’t figure out what to do with the glitching word or phrase, it will just leave the big red flashing question mark where it is in the movie, creating a hole in the understanding of the reader and making the movie pocketed with little confusions that limit its coherence and effectiveness.
To be both a great reader and writer, students need to build a crackerjack movie-maker within themselves. When they read, they need to actively construct from the word-frames a movie in their minds that is vivid, coherent, and complete, that squeezes from the words all of their meanings and deciphers the interrelationships between their parts to build as accurate, detailed, and comprehensive a reconstruction as possible. When a word-frame that holds no meaning for them glitches and pauses the process, they need a movie-maker that will flash red question marks and set off irritable alarms that drive the reader to figure out the meaning from the context clues or turn to a dictionary to see what the word means. They need a movie-maker that is willing to rewind and run that sentence through again, and that can pause and contemplate and generate questions and wonder. They need a movie-maker that is sensitive and ever on the look out for that subtle feeling that maybe it is missing something, that maybe that little root their sense-maker tripped over could lead to some deeper meaning; they need one that is willing to dig and gets its hands dirty to figure things out. When they are guided to the possibility, students build such a movie-maker by working through challenging reading and receiving rigorous feedback on their comprehension that lets them know when they are missing something or not reconstructing their movie of the reading effectively.
As a writer, students learn to turn the movie-maker to their own words and run their writing through the sense-making machine to watch what kind of movie their words do in fact build. They learn to make their movie-maker sensitive to the flow of their words and to be able to identify the exact word-frame where the movie-maker started to glitch and not know what to do. We say in class all of the time, when you run that paragraph through the movie-maker, does it have any glitches? At what word or phrase does it start to beep and throw up some flashing red question marks? Where does the picture start to get fuzzing, making the reader wonder if it means this or if it means that? Students enjoy playing with this metaphor and visual image; it helps to concretize in an engaging way what good readers do and how good writers test to see if their work is effective. It is one of my most dynamic tools for refining students’ understanding of the key skills of reading and writing.
The Foundational Idea of Structure
Understanding the importance of structure is fundament in life, not only in writing. Through the process of trial and error, humankind has developed powerful structures in many domains of life that have been proven to succeed through rigorous testing and refinement from their constant use. Numerous nomadic hunting and gathering societies around the world discovered that the domed hut design was the best for their purposes, enabling them to build in an hour or two a solid structure that kept out the elements and provided protection. Sedentary societies developed permanent building based on the basic structure of a solid foundation, sturdy sidewalls, and a protective roof. Storytellers worldwide discovered the power of the narrative structure that introduces a story problem that is worked through in rising action scenes, leads to the solution of the problem in a climatic event, and closes in a resolution. All of these examples of structures have been used for thousands of years because they are tried and true, proven solutions that get the job done.
The story is the same in the practice of writing; there are tried and true structures that work. Using these basic structures gives writers a proven framework for the effective communication of their ideas. One of my students who struggles with organization and self-confidence recently spoke to the class about the writing structures with a sense of relief. He explained that the writing structures act like a form that he can pour his thoughts into that ensure they will come out well ordered and in a way that the reader can easily digest and more readily understand. His simple analogy explains so beautifully the powerful impact teaching the basic structures of writing can have and why I make them the foundation of my writing program.
Paragraph Construction: The Basic Unit of Writing
I teach my students a basic paragraph structure for both analytical and expository writing. We explore how the fundamental and most important unit of all writing is the paragraph. If you can construct an effective paragraph, then you have the heart of building longer written works. If you know how to build a strong brick, then you can readily make a solid structure by placing brick upon brick. When you master paragraph construction, you can construct the fundamental unit of writing and are well on your way to being an effective writer. I teach students the basic components needed to build a solid paragraph and their logical order. We dig deep into the purpose of each part and how it functions with the other elements to fashion a whole. My students work extensively with the logic of paragraph structure so that they are not simply following a recipe mindlessly, but are able to explain with clarity and put to use with flexibility the components of paragraph construction to communicate their thinking effectively.
A Color Code System to Illuminate Structure
To help students better learn the structures for analytical and expository paragraphs, we employ a color-code system for each component of the paragraph. For the analytical paragraph, for example, we use orange colored text for transitions to the new paragraph, which is composed of: part 1, blue colored text for the idea given in the topic sentence; part 2, black for the evidence presented as support; and part 3, green for the explanation of how the evidence given in part 2 proves the idea given in part 1. We use a variation of this basic color-code scheme for the construction of expository paragraphs.
For narrative writing that is creative and free flowing, we do not use a color scheme for the paragraph but for the overall story construction; I will explain this in detail below in the narrative writing section. The color code systems we employ help students build solid paragraphs and improves their writing.
Two Essay Writing Formats and Their Definitions
Writing instructors at the high school and college levels have a range of opinion about the names of different writing formats, making it important for me to clarify exactly what types of formats we focus on in my program and precisely what I mean by the names I give these structures. First, I want you to know that I do not attempt to teach the full spectrum of essay possibilities outlined by experts. Instead, I focus on two types used for the two basic purposes I believe form the central core of writing needed by students, and I teach those two formats in depth. In my view, teaching the full range of formats does little to truly develop the middle or high school student’s writing and is unimportant; any writer who is firmly grounded in the two basic formats I emphasize can easily adjust their purpose and form to reproduce any of the other variety of formats that college-level writing instructors might want. My goal is to deeply develop the students’ ability to write effectively, and I believe that by focusing on two fundamental formats I am able to do this more successfully.
The first type of essay format I teach has the purpose of analysis. The students must analyze a topic to generate their own ideas and write to prove those ideas to the reader with the use of evidence and logical explanation or argument. I simply call this type of essay an analytical essay because it describes for my students the process they are undertaking. Other writing experts call this type of writing an argumentative essay or an expository essay or an objective essay; I can find no clear agreement.
The second type of essay I teach my students has the purpose of explaining to the reader a topic that is already known and established. The students’ goal is to inform or educate the reader about the topic. The students are not generating their own original ideas through an analytical process but have studied a known topic and are teaching and explaining it to their audience. I call this type an expository essay, an essay that informs and explains. Many writing instructors also would use this term, although others call essays that make arguments and defend a thesis expository essays. Again, writing instructors have little agreement on terminology. I choose to use the terminology that best describes the purpose of this essay structure, calling it an expository essay.
The Analytical Essay Writing Process
The training I give my students in analytical essay writing is one of the most significant and consequential parts of my program, second only to their training in critical thinking for its impact on their future success in school and thereafter. This is because of the great value derived from being able to analyze material, construct your own meaning, and communicate your ideas with clarity and strong supporting evidence and argument.
I teach my students what I call the analytical essay writing process. Its power is that it provides students with a process for constructing knowledge in the humanities, something akin to the process used in the hard sciences, the scientific method. I am not merely teaching students “how to write a paper;” I am training them how to conduct a complete process for analysis, something usually lacking in the teaching of the humanities. How many high school or college students have been given the command to “write a paper” without being given a framework for what doing that successfully entails. It is like telling the science student to “write up a lab report” without helping them to understand the long, involved process of the scientific method that will allow them to have any conclusions to “write up.” That is how I frame it for my students; I am teaching an entire process for intellectual inquiry and the discovery of their own ideas and construction of their own knowledge in the humanities. Beginning with the choice of a topic to investigate, this analytical process guides learners step-by-step through three levels of successive analysis that will help them to discover ideas, synthesize them into a logical whole, summarize them into a thesis statement, organize them into an outline and plan for communication, and structures them into paragraphs that support and prove their ideas with clarity, evidence, and logical argument, to produce the final essay. My goal is to teach students to know exactly how to proceed and produce excellent results when their college professor tells them to “write a paper.”
I was inspired to create this analytical process for the humanities so that my students would not suffer like I did when I went through the master’s degree level without hearing a word about how to conduct an intellectual investigation. I think that teaching in the humanities through at least the undergraduate level often fails to give students clearly identified methods of inquiry and is limited by its almost exclusive focus on the absorption of subject matter. While the sciences have their scientific method and math has it process for proofs, the humanities are mute and do little to help students become intellectual inquirers with a set of powerful tools at their disposal. In addition to my analytical inquiry process, Dr. Paul’s critical thinking methods are an exceptional and rare example of tools that help students construct knowledge in the humanities. In support of his methods, the analytical essay writing process I designed is my attempt to give students an overarching process for inquiry and the communication of their ideas in the humanities.
Brief Overview of the Analytical Essay Writing Process
My students achieve independence in learning, one of the principle objectives of my humanities program, through the analytical essay writing process. It challenges them to undertake their own analysis of a topic, discover important ideas about it, and teach their findings to others through an essay. We use this process to investigate topics in both language arts and social studies.
The first part of the process focuses on analysis, where students are asked to scrutinize a body of material, such as a novel or historical accounts, and to develop their own ideas about the topic. The second part of the process is focused on communicating to the reader the ideas discovered through an essay, in the same way that a lab report communicates the findings of a scientific inquiry.
The first steps of the analytical process are to identify the field of data and topic to be investigated. Then, the students use note cards to record the ideas they find, the evidence that supports the idea, and the page and paragraph where the evidence is found. They push themselves to discover as many different ideas on the topic as they can as they read through the material. At the end of this first level of analysis, they rework and hone the wording of their ideas to create a final list of major ideas.
A second level of analysis begins when students create a cause and effect flow chart to map out the interrelationships between all of their individual ideas and synthesize them into a logical whole. This process allows the students to discover the most significant ideas that act as what we call the fundamentals or the deepest causal factors, the ideas that begin the chains of cause and effect and have the greatest impact on the topic. Unlike the loose mind mapping technique used by many educators for brainstorming, these cause and effect flow charts are highly disciplined exercises in logic, synthesis, and argumentation. They make my analytical process unique and uniquely powerful for developing students’ thinking and learning skills. The goal of synthesizing ideas with flow charts sets my essay writing process apart and adds a rigorous, vital dimension of analysis not commonly undertaken in the teaching of essay writing.
The third and final level of analysis is the creation of a thesis statement that explains the logic of their flow chart of ideas and sums up the findings of their investigation. Now that the analytical phase is completed, students shift gears to work on the communication of their ideas. The thesis statement also acts as the first step in the communication process, where the students share the findings of their analysis in essay form to teach the reader.
One of the most important results of these analytical essay writing projects is that they help students realize they are fully capable of discovering ideas on their own and constructing their own understanding of a topic. It helps to show students they are powerful, nurtures their self-confidence, and gives them essential tools required for independence in learning.
For further information on the analytical essay writing process, please see the wealth of examples of student work provided elsewhere on this website. They will help you get a more concrete understanding of what students do to complete this process and the level of success they can achieve with it.
My students achieve independence in learning, one of the principle objectives of my humanities program, through the analytical essay writing process. It challenges them to undertake their own analysis of a topic, discover important ideas about it, and teach their findings to others through an essay. We use this process to investigate topics in both language arts and social studies.
The first part of the process focuses on analysis, where students are asked to scrutinize a body of material, such as a novel or historical accounts, and to develop their own ideas about the topic. The second part of the process is focused on communicating to the reader the ideas discovered through an essay, in the same way that a lab report communicates the findings of a scientific inquiry.
The first steps of the analytical process are to identify the field of data and topic to be investigated. Then, the students use note cards to record the ideas they find, the evidence that supports the idea, and the page and paragraph where the evidence is found. They push themselves to discover as many different ideas on the topic as they can as they read through the material. At the end of this first level of analysis, they rework and hone the wording of their ideas to create a final list of major ideas.
A second level of analysis begins when students create a cause and effect flow chart to map out the interrelationships between all of their individual ideas and synthesize them into a logical whole. This process allows the students to discover the most significant ideas that act as what we call the fundamentals or the deepest causal factors, the ideas that begin the chains of cause and effect and have the greatest impact on the topic. Unlike the loose mind mapping technique used by many educators for brainstorming, these cause and effect flow charts are highly disciplined exercises in logic, synthesis, and argumentation. They make my analytical process unique and uniquely powerful for developing students’ thinking and learning skills. The goal of synthesizing ideas with flow charts sets my essay writing process apart and adds a rigorous, vital dimension of analysis not commonly undertaken in the teaching of essay writing.
The third and final level of analysis is the creation of a thesis statement that explains the logic of their flow chart of ideas and sums up the findings of their investigation. Now that the analytical phase is completed, students shift gears to work on the communication of their ideas. The thesis statement also acts as the first step in the communication process, where the students share the findings of their analysis in essay form to teach the reader.
One of the most important results of these analytical essay writing projects is that they help students realize they are fully capable of discovering ideas on their own and constructing their own understanding of a topic. It helps to show students they are powerful, nurtures their self-confidence, and gives them essential tools required for independence in learning.
For further information on the analytical essay writing process, please see the wealth of examples of student work provided elsewhere on this website. They will help you get a more concrete understanding of what students do to complete this process and the level of success they can achieve with it.
Expository Essay Writing
Expository essay writing is the second important writing format my students learn. As noted above, the purpose of this format is to inform and educate the reader about an established, known topic. We explain the goal as this: the more clearly and fully the students educate their audience, a reader on their grade level who knows nothing about the topic, the more successful their expository essay will be.
Students use this format to solidify their understanding of a topic we have studied. They often write an expository essay as a culminating project for a unit of study to consolidate their understanding through the challenge of teaching it to others through writing. In this way, they grasp the content more firmly, work it deeply into their being through the rigors of writing, and practice the art of written explanation.
The structure of the expository paragraph employs the basic components of a transition, topic sentence, and concluding sentence. In addition to these standard parts, I teach students four distinct ways to explain a topic taught by Dr. Richard Paul. He notes that your audience will better apprehend a topic if it approached in four different ways, each giving the reader a different angle on the concept. Effective explanations will state, elaborate, exemplify, and illustrate. They will state, conceptualizing the topic concisely into a topic sentence, and follow this up with elaboration that unfolds and expands the statement further. Next, the writer will exemplify, providing a concrete example from life, and provide an illustration, either adding an actual picture, diagram, or chart to the writing or using a creative analogy or metaphor that furthers the explanation in a more inventive and comparative manner. Finally, the paragraph is wrapped up with a closing sentence that refers back to the main topic of the paragraph to end the explanation. Like with the analytical paragraph format, students use a color code system to illustrate each part of the expository paragraph. With continued practice, students learn to weave together the four methods of explanation—state, elaborate, exemplify, and illustrate—into paragraphs that clearly and completely educate the reader.
Narrative Writing: the Short Story
In addition to the two academic formats emphasized in my program, analytical and expository writing, I also seek to develop the students’ creative writing abilities through the narrative form and short story writing. This format is a familiar and effective way for students to explore and express their personal interests and exercise their creativity
Although creative writers approach their work in different ways, my teaching experience has taught me that young learners are more successful when they think through their short story and create a detailed plan for their narrative. Of course a wide range of creative techniques can be used to ignite the creative process and generate ideas. Once students have settled upon a story idea, they employ the elements of reason to flesh out their thinking and begin the initial design of their story.
Using the Elements of Reason to Develop Creative Short Story Narratives
From the students’ point of view as the authors, they use the elements of reason to clarify what they want to accomplish through their story. They determine the purpose of their story and what they want their audience to experience by reading it. They may want the reader to laugh and look for the good side of an unfortunate event or feel sadness and contemplate the horrors of war. Clarifying their goals as the author sets the target for their story and provides direction. Next, they use the element of reason questions to determine the essential problem that will propel the story forward, and use the element of conclusions to decide how the story problem will be addressed and answered in the climax of the story. The element of concepts challenges them to decide the important themes of their story. The students are required to have one or more themes woven into the fabric of the plot to give their story depth and significance; rather than creating mindless entertainment, they must instill meaning into the story that will elevate it to a higher level as great art does. The remaining elements of reason are employed to complete the initial design of the story. In addition to helping to make a solid story, this assignment enables the students to experience the power of the elements of reason in a creative domain and expand their understanding of how they truly are universal tools that can be used to improve the quality of any undertaking.
Once the authors have completed their initial story plan with the elements of reason, they generate a design for the plot that will follow the standard narrative structure and map out the main events of each scene, from the opening, through the rising action scenes, to the climax, and resolution. Next, students use the elements of reason once again to create characters that are richly imagined, specific, and have depth. They ask themselves, “What are my main character’s purposes? What questions or problems does he have, and from what points of view does he look at the situation? What assumptions undergird his thinking? As they consider each element of reason in turn, the authors build up a thoughtfully designed character that will contribute to their story’s success.
Expository essay writing is the second important writing format my students learn. As noted above, the purpose of this format is to inform and educate the reader about an established, known topic. We explain the goal as this: the more clearly and fully the students educate their audience, a reader on their grade level who knows nothing about the topic, the more successful their expository essay will be.
Students use this format to solidify their understanding of a topic we have studied. They often write an expository essay as a culminating project for a unit of study to consolidate their understanding through the challenge of teaching it to others through writing. In this way, they grasp the content more firmly, work it deeply into their being through the rigors of writing, and practice the art of written explanation.
The structure of the expository paragraph employs the basic components of a transition, topic sentence, and concluding sentence. In addition to these standard parts, I teach students four distinct ways to explain a topic taught by Dr. Richard Paul. He notes that your audience will better apprehend a topic if it approached in four different ways, each giving the reader a different angle on the concept. Effective explanations will state, elaborate, exemplify, and illustrate. They will state, conceptualizing the topic concisely into a topic sentence, and follow this up with elaboration that unfolds and expands the statement further. Next, the writer will exemplify, providing a concrete example from life, and provide an illustration, either adding an actual picture, diagram, or chart to the writing or using a creative analogy or metaphor that furthers the explanation in a more inventive and comparative manner. Finally, the paragraph is wrapped up with a closing sentence that refers back to the main topic of the paragraph to end the explanation. Like with the analytical paragraph format, students use a color code system to illustrate each part of the expository paragraph. With continued practice, students learn to weave together the four methods of explanation—state, elaborate, exemplify, and illustrate—into paragraphs that clearly and completely educate the reader.
Narrative Writing: the Short Story
In addition to the two academic formats emphasized in my program, analytical and expository writing, I also seek to develop the students’ creative writing abilities through the narrative form and short story writing. This format is a familiar and effective way for students to explore and express their personal interests and exercise their creativity
Although creative writers approach their work in different ways, my teaching experience has taught me that young learners are more successful when they think through their short story and create a detailed plan for their narrative. Of course a wide range of creative techniques can be used to ignite the creative process and generate ideas. Once students have settled upon a story idea, they employ the elements of reason to flesh out their thinking and begin the initial design of their story.
Using the Elements of Reason to Develop Creative Short Story Narratives
From the students’ point of view as the authors, they use the elements of reason to clarify what they want to accomplish through their story. They determine the purpose of their story and what they want their audience to experience by reading it. They may want the reader to laugh and look for the good side of an unfortunate event or feel sadness and contemplate the horrors of war. Clarifying their goals as the author sets the target for their story and provides direction. Next, they use the element of reason questions to determine the essential problem that will propel the story forward, and use the element of conclusions to decide how the story problem will be addressed and answered in the climax of the story. The element of concepts challenges them to decide the important themes of their story. The students are required to have one or more themes woven into the fabric of the plot to give their story depth and significance; rather than creating mindless entertainment, they must instill meaning into the story that will elevate it to a higher level as great art does. The remaining elements of reason are employed to complete the initial design of the story. In addition to helping to make a solid story, this assignment enables the students to experience the power of the elements of reason in a creative domain and expand their understanding of how they truly are universal tools that can be used to improve the quality of any undertaking.
Once the authors have completed their initial story plan with the elements of reason, they generate a design for the plot that will follow the standard narrative structure and map out the main events of each scene, from the opening, through the rising action scenes, to the climax, and resolution. Next, students use the elements of reason once again to create characters that are richly imagined, specific, and have depth. They ask themselves, “What are my main character’s purposes? What questions or problems does he have, and from what points of view does he look at the situation? What assumptions undergird his thinking? As they consider each element of reason in turn, the authors build up a thoughtfully designed character that will contribute to their story’s success.
The Color Code System for Short Story Writing
Similar to the academic writing formats, my students also utilize a color code system for narrative writing that helps them to see better how they are building up their writing. While in academic writing we color code by paragraph, in creative narrative writing it is more useful to use a color scheme for the overall story construction. We use colors to identify four different types of writing that help to build an effective story: narrative, dialogue, vivid description of the outer world, and insight into the characters inner world of thoughts, emotions, and reactions to events. These four different types of writing are like different data streams that good writers feed to their reader’s movie-makers so that it can build up a more complex, layered film. When students review their story and see long sections composed of only the red ink used for dialogue, they realize they are only feeding the words of characters to the movie-maker and not inputting any green colored visual descriptive data that helps the movie-maker know what it should see on its screen. When the authors notice endless passages of black ink for narrative, they realize they again are feeding only a one-dimensional data stream to the movie-makers and know they should add some blue to add the inner thoughts, emotions, and reactions of characters or some green vivid description to program some visual information into the imagining machine. Using a color-scheme for each type of writing helps students see what they are doing with greater clarity. Many report how our color-coding brings greater awareness and focus to their writing and helps to make their stories more richly imagined.
Conclusion
I hope this lengthy exposition on the specifics of my teaching program helped you to understand what I do and why I do it, and will enable you to judge how my teaching program can help your child to learn and grow as a student. If you have any questions about my program, I am happy to discuss it with you further. Please contact me, and we can set up a time to talk.
Similar to the academic writing formats, my students also utilize a color code system for narrative writing that helps them to see better how they are building up their writing. While in academic writing we color code by paragraph, in creative narrative writing it is more useful to use a color scheme for the overall story construction. We use colors to identify four different types of writing that help to build an effective story: narrative, dialogue, vivid description of the outer world, and insight into the characters inner world of thoughts, emotions, and reactions to events. These four different types of writing are like different data streams that good writers feed to their reader’s movie-makers so that it can build up a more complex, layered film. When students review their story and see long sections composed of only the red ink used for dialogue, they realize they are only feeding the words of characters to the movie-maker and not inputting any green colored visual descriptive data that helps the movie-maker know what it should see on its screen. When the authors notice endless passages of black ink for narrative, they realize they again are feeding only a one-dimensional data stream to the movie-makers and know they should add some blue to add the inner thoughts, emotions, and reactions of characters or some green vivid description to program some visual information into the imagining machine. Using a color-scheme for each type of writing helps students see what they are doing with greater clarity. Many report how our color-coding brings greater awareness and focus to their writing and helps to make their stories more richly imagined.
Conclusion
I hope this lengthy exposition on the specifics of my teaching program helped you to understand what I do and why I do it, and will enable you to judge how my teaching program can help your child to learn and grow as a student. If you have any questions about my program, I am happy to discuss it with you further. Please contact me, and we can set up a time to talk.