This year on Moving Writers, I am dusting off some old-but-wise books on my shelf about writing, creating a tiny review, then considering how one passage from the book can inform writing instruction today, even decades after the book was first published. This month, I’ll consider an excerpt from the book Poetry Is by Ted […]
Tag: prewriting
Using Two-Pagers to Fuel Analytical Writing
I’ll admit: I’m a sucker for beautiful notebook work. I will tell students that the quality of the thinking is really what matters — and I mean it. But I also swoon when I see gorgeous notebook pages. I associate gorgeous “two-page spreads” with Penny Kittle and the thinking she has been sharing with teachers […]
Environmental Justice, Comic Book Storytelling, and Seed Work
In Charlie La Greca and Rebecca Bratspies’ environmental justice comic, Mayah’s Lot, the image of the aspen seed is prominent. The titular character intends to plant an aspen seed in a garden she secretly tends on a vacant lot, just before finding out a corporation’s plan to transform the lot into an industrial toxic storage waste facility. […]
Front-loading the Writing Process: Reducing the Cognitive Load
Picasso’s quote may seem somewhat contradictory as giving answers is not necessarily a useless trait; however, dig a little deeper and it makes a lot of sense. Computers (or rather Google) give us the answers we are looking for — we receive an output for a question asked. This isn’t necessarily a negative thing — […]
Poetry as Prewrite (part 1)
We are so very happy to introduce you to our newest contributing writer, Brett Vogelsinger. Brett teaches high school English in Pennsylvania, but might already know him from the brilliance he shares all day every day on Twitter (@theVogelman). We’ve been borrowing good ideas from him for awhile, and we are so happy that he […]
Writer’s Telephone – an Information-Gathering, Idea-Nuturing Strategy
I feel like I’ve been engaged in a pedagogical ancestry project recently — mapping my teaching forebears through generations. In floods of professional books, blogs, Tweets, and chats, these ideals into which I have become so deeply entrenched sometimes lose their original source. Like a game of educational Telephone, the message gets translated and retranslated, […]