What does healthy literacy look like? What does a healthy reading life look like? What does Writing Health look like?
Category: David Lee Finkle
Writing That Matters: The Emotional Emergency Kit
Letting students journal freely about their lives, their feelings, may be the best emotional learning we can possibly give them.
The Fiction-Fix for Bad Endings: Incident-Irony
I thought, There must be a key to good endings. It must be a skill – a teachable, practice-able skill.
The answer: Irony.
The Un-Rubric: An Experiment in Feedback
Rubrics tend to be about compliance, not thinking…
A Little Write Music
What does Stephen Sondheim have to do with writing instruction? The answer: Everything.
Reading As Writers: Big Picture and Closeup
Great student writers, the ones whose work I can’t wait to read, notice what writers do and begin to see how it all works together.
Big Picture/Closeup: a model for reading and writing
Closeup elements are how the story is told. Big Picture elements are the story itself.
The Choices Writers Make (If Allowed)
“…in many writing classrooms, students are learning to write by not being allowed to do any of the things “real” writers do: make choices.”
The Power of Writing Collaborative Fiction
The experience of writing a novel together didn’t inhibit individual creativity – it made them all want to go home and write more on their own.
The World’s Most Boring Topics
I tell them that just as a good standup comedian can read out of the phone book and make it funny, a good writer can take a dull topic and make it interesting.
moving writers 