If our voice in writing is made up of a combination of our personality, our experiences, and our culture, we must let it inform our tone as we approach a subject.
Category: analysis
Analyzing Audience with the College Essay
Today’s guest post is from Paige Timmerman, a high school English teacher in Salem, Illinois. You can connect with her on Twitter at @pbrink12 or via e-mail at timmermanp@salemhigh.com. When I decided to take the plunge and try writer’s workshop over the summer, I knew I wanted a unit on college application and scholarship essays for […]
Memoir Study Remix: The Broken Piece
One of the best things about the Moving Writers community is the open sharing that happens here, as well as the sharing and discussion that occurs in our Twitter PLN. People ask questions, have them answered, find inspiration and share ideas and resources on a regular basis. It’s quite remarkable, and shows the importance of […]
“Word by Word”: Thinking About Close Reading, Revision, and NCTE
The title of Anne Lamott’s book on writing, Bird by Bird, comes from a family story that a favorite colleague of mine also liked to tell when she was helping students get started with their writing. As Lamott tells it, when her father saw her brother overwhelmed by the task of a report on birds […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Talking About a Text That Matters to You
Mentor Text: What Static Shock Meant To Me As a Young Black Boy by Jaylen Pearson Writing Techniques: Writing About a Text Applying a Critical Lens Highlighting an Impactful Moment Writing an Introduction Background: My Grade 12 course is tied to a theme based around identity, individuality and independence, which we call The Three Is. […]
Teaching From My Twitter Feed: Diction, Syntax, and the Gray Lady
When you need to explore the power of diction and syntax with your students, looking at actual editorial revisions made by professional journalists seems like a great place to start!
Why This/Not That? A thinking routine to move kids from identification to analysis
One of the biggest challenges in teaching rhetorical analysis is teaching kids to move beyond identification to actual analysis. I have found over the years that when I teach kids to look for certain things, they find them!! If we talk about repetition, they can track it down. If we talk about parallel structure, boom. […]
A Lesson on Beautiful Sentences
There is so much ugliness in the world. Enough to last us all for a good long while. As I was adjusting my classes this week, I thought, why not beauty? My AP students have been fixated on the weird and wonderful language in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. And frankly, I’m not over it, have […]
All the Culture Wars We Cannot See
When asking students to write about topics that require a lot of context, we have to consider not only what THEY might not know, but what WE might not know when we give students freedom to write about their world.
Argument in the Wild: Reading & Writing from Media-Rich Texts
The idea that “everything’s an argument” seems almost too obvious these days. After all, talk to almost any adolescent today and it’s clear how aware they are of the ways in which they are constantly being persuaded, whether it’s an editorial from the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, the latest newscast from […]
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