One of your students has submitted a stellar report on a country, including a baked and painted salt-flour-water topography of a particular geographic feature. Another drags his feet and submits a writing assignment late.
You want to reward the one and motivate the other. What can you do?
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Angeli Vanlaanen has had it rough. When she was ten years old, she fell ill and continued to experience symptoms until she was twenty-four: headaches, sore muscles and joints, fatigue, fainting, blurry vision, and so forth.
Still, she pushed herself to learn how to ice skate and snow ski. Her sport of choice is women’s halfpipe skiing, which she competed in despite the severe pain in her joints and her other physical ailments.
Doctors had long ago given up trying to diagnose her illness. Maybe she was making up the symptoms. Maybe it was all in her head—that is, until her aunt
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My husband Terry gave me the idea for this writing prompt though he didn’t know it at the time.
Last summer we drove to our local grocery store, and as Terry pulled into a spot, he said, “I like to park here because . . . ,” and he listed four reasons why he likes to park in that particular place. Now that you know how exciting our lives are, you’ll be happy to know that his love of lists surfaced yet again—at the ball park.
We were watching the Indianapolis Indians play the Rochester Redwings when one of the Indians smacked a ball and headed toward first. Terry leaned over to me and said, “There are nine ways to get to first safely.” Or was it seven?
Terry was halfway to writing an enumerative essay because he began with a number (four or nine) and had a secure idea of a list.
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Aren’t descriptions those portions of books that you skip? Aren’t they boring? Don’t they stop the forward movement of the plot?
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Sometimes they do. But when you are the writer, you don’t have to stop the movement even if you are describing something.
An effective writer makes a description move. Wind blows the curtains. The sea surges on the shore in frothy waves. The train plows through fields of ripe winter wheat. You get the idea.
Read the following description of an abandoned cabin from Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire and figure out what is moving:
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Heifers. Cowpokes. Cottonwoods. Hullabaloo.
What do these words have in common? Well, if you were a cowboy poet, you would know!
The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering is held in Elko, Nevada, each year. Singers and poets compete, attend workshops, and dance. Watch Randy Rieman recite his humorous poem about being “throwed” from a bronco here.
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Gardeners love to receive their new seed catalogs in the middle of winter. It gives them something to dream about and plan for. Not only are the photos of flowers and vegetables beautiful and inspiring but their descriptions are as well.
Here’s the description of the Erewhon Sweet Pea from a Burpee catalog:
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When Maya Angelou, author of the moving autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was eleven years old, she was reunited with her birth mother, whom she hadn’t seen in eight years. Young Maya was unhappy.
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After two weeks, her mother still had not seen her smile. Here’s the exchange between Maya and her mother, recorded in Mom & Me & Mom (Random House, 2013):
Proofreading is painful for students. They feel they’re through with the writing process when they write their first draft and then want nothing more to do with that essay. Students tell me that writing the first draft and proofreading it is like writing their paper twice.
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However, the skill of proofreading their own papers is essential to the writing process.
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What methods can we teach our students so they can proofread their work by themselves?
Some kids hate writing essays, and off the top of their heads they can give you 97 reasons why this is so.
When I teach my writing course locally, some students are bound to come to the first class with a “don’t even bother trying to teach me” attitude. They believe they are so far gone that they are unteachable.
I disagree.
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When you want to know what time it is, where do you look?
Most likely, you tell time by clocks of some sort. But what if you told time by flowers, birds, or scents?
Huh?
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