Reading for Writing: Modeling the Modern Essay

Teaching Strategies

Writers Workshop

Writers Workshop is an instructional approach that is intended to create the conditions necessary for students to read as a writer and explore the craft choices that authors make so that students can make similar choices when writing independently. It is important to briefly note that teaching writing is not easy; there are many components that need to be taught to foster effective writing. Research also indicates that there is a high prevalence of writing disabilities in many students that we teach; researchers found writing disabilities to affect between 6.9% and 14.7% of students and to exist with and without reading problems.⁴² The range of student abilities that often exist within a classroom should push teachers away from whole group instruction to consider ways to give more targeted and specific feedback to each writer to meet instructional needs. Writers Workshop is an instructional approach that seeks to give targeted feedback that is appropriate to each learner. There is also some language that might be helpful when working with students in a Writers Workshop. Kissel and Miller (2015) suggest that teachers think about their questioning carefully before they confer with student writers, advocating for student choice in writing topics, locations and partners to write with in class.⁴³ These are all important conditions to think about as one organizes the structure of the workshop in a classroom.

The general way that I set up my Writers Workshop is that I highlight one writing habit or practice I want students to learn, they practice the habit or element of craft, they share what they learn, and then I look for that habit to appear in their writing products as I confer or assess student writing. My thought is to teach the writer, not just teach new modes of writing. There is a link in the resource section to an article that explores the types of questions that can be used to confer with students. The author argues that there are four questions that work in almost all scenarios: 1. How is it going? 2. Can you say more about that? 3. Would you consider trying ________ technique? 4. Are you ready to try this?⁴⁴ Given the nature of open-ended questions, students must explain their thinking about craft. This is putting the student in a position to make authentic writing decisions.

Character Sketch

Both profiles and personal experience essays make use of the character sketch. Many students do not think about characters in ways beyond describing their appearance. Students need to be taught different ways the elements of a character could be described to create images in the reader’s mind while reading. In the resource section below, there is a link to a graphic organizer that is extremely helpful for teachers to get students thinking about the aspects of the characters that they are writing about. The graphic organizer has students think about several areas such as: physical description, background information, character trait information, significant events that shaped a character, potential stereotypes about the character, relationships that character has, the essence of the character, and the motivations and ambitions of the character.⁴⁵ As we read profiles in class, students will use this template to think about how the character is crafted in the text. My goal is to get students to see that authors rely on a lot of different means of description to paint a full picture of a character.

Close Reading and Assessment

To help students decide whether they want to write either a profile or a personal experience essay, students need to read a couple of profiles and personal experience essays to think about the choices that authors make. There are a few sections that I have flagged in the research above that I will stop and discuss with my students from the content research above. In the Yale course, English S120E: Reading and Writing the Modern Essay, there are several different types of writing that students explore in readings and conversation: Personal Experience, Profile, Cultural Criticism, Review, Op-ed, Expert Knowledge, Description of a Place, Writing for the Ear, and others.  From these readings, students are expected to write four different types of essays to workshop with peers: a personal experience essay, a profile, a cultural criticism/political argument, and a review to have workshopped by peers. This structure is valuable and can be modified in a few ways to suit different instructional contexts. For the purposes of this unit, the genre conventions of personal experience essays and profiles will be discussed and explored with students. To encourage autonomy and motivation, I am going to allow students the opportunity to choose the genre that they want to write in to demonstrate mastery.