Content
Framework for Teaching Writing
How to Read Like a Writer
Part of giving students the agency and critical thinking skills to be able to gain confidence in writing will mean teaching them how to read the varied mentor texts through a writer’s lens. So often, we teach children to read for understanding, or unfortunately, more rarely, to read for enjoyment. However, to read like a writer is both to read for enjoyment and to read as a critic to understand how a piece is put together.6 In a chapter titled “How to Read Like a Writer” in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 2, Mike Bunn succinctly describes what it means to read like a writer:
You are reading to learn about writing.
Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in the writing (which you will automatically do to some degree anyway), you are trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together by the author and what you can learn about writing by reading a particular text. As you read in this way, you think about how the choice the author made and the techniques that he/she used are influencing your own responses as a reader. What is it about the way this text is written that makes you feel and respond the way you do?”7
Reading like a writer means exploring the feelings a piece evokes and the moves the writer made to produce those effects. Writing, students will begin to understand, is not something that comes from divine inspiration, but from careful crafting of sentences. Furthermore, Verlyn Klinkenborg notes, “Writing well and reading well mean paying attention to all the subtleties in a sentence” because each sentence has a different impact on a piece and no two sentences are the same.8 Teaching students to read like writers, and to read informational texts about the rationale for doing so, will not only give them an opportunity to read the mentor texts and other students’ work with a writer’s eye, but it will also allow them to collect information about the writing they enjoy and mimic it in their own work. Reading like a writer is empowering; it gives students more of an identity as writers by giving them a toolbox, everyone else’s written words, to work from. It also serves as a metacognitive lens for them to think about their own thinking, which will lead them to think about their choices in their own writing.
The unit will begin with students reading excerpts of Bunn’s article and Klinkenborg’s book to frame their thinking about writing.
Holistic Writing Framework: Ruth Culham’s 6+1 Traits of Writing
While reading like a writer is a critical aspect of developing one’s writing skills, middle school students need to be able to put their learnings and observations into a framework as a scaffold for their writing journey. In her 2003 book 6+1 Traits of Writing, Ruth Culham provides a clear student-friendly framework to break down the elements of writing into seven key areas -- ideas, organization, sentence fluency, word choice, voice, conventions, and presentation. By naming the writers’ moves in each mentor text that we study and then filing each choice under the larger umbrella of a specific trait, students will begin looking behind the curtain of strong writing. Grounding their learning in stories from several voices and repeating the process of recognizing the writers’ choices regarding these traits will help students form new neural pathways—driving “new learning deeper into long-term memory until it becomes automatic or deeply understood. When neurons in different regions of the brain ‘fire’ together during a learning task, the pathways are linked and strengthened, leading to stronger and deeper learning.”9 The process of accessing this information speeds up through the process of myelination. Hammond writes, “Repetition or deliberate practice of a specific move…triggers the release of myelin, and initiates the wrapping process [when the brain wraps neurons in a fatty substance called myelin].”10 Myelination causes the learning to become “sticky,” giving students quicker access to the skill. Using the framework of the traits will also hone students’ skills as writers by providing them with the language and understanding to brainstorm, craft, and evaluate their own compelling narratives. Culham argues, “When students learn the tools that help them unlock the mysteries of revision and editing, they take ownership of the writing process.”11
The 6+1 traits will provide students with a framework for how to discuss student writing and our mentor texts. Each week to week and a half, I will teach a mini-lesson about a trait. In the mini-lesson, I will define the trait and look at examples of the trait in use. We will then look at the rubric for the final assignment and show how it aligns with the trait. Students will then examine mentor texts through the lens of the trait, using the rubric checklist to note how the writer uses the focal trait. They will use their writer’s notebooks or graphic organizers to capture examples of the techniques the author is using and the effect they create on the reader. Throughout the week, we will continue examining the trait in mentor texts and write both analytical paragraphs about the impacts of their choices on the writing and narrative pieces where we mimic their usage. Students can refer to their notes and to the texts as they practice.
The traits that Culham defines in this work are Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, Conventions, and Presentation. In the following sections, I will describe each trait as Culham does and then elaborate on how different writing moves could be classified under each trait.
Ideas
Ideas are the content of the writing or the core message.12 As teachers, we need to help students with topic selection, topic narrowing, developing the idea, and supporting the idea with details.13 One of the greater struggles with ideas that students face is that they have often been trained out of writing for themselves. Instead, they are writing to finish. The danger of this is that it hinders their growth as writers. Culham encourages flexibility for student writers in trying something different and challenging the topic a bit. This also means that as teachers, we have to be mindful of overcorrecting something to the point at which a student doesn’t recognize themselves in the writing.14
To understand the Ideas trait in action, we will consider mentor texts from Viola Davis, Reg Ogle, Trevor Noah, and Javier Zamora. We will read like writers to consider the topics that are being discussed in each piece and compare the different authors’ treatments of these topics. For example, all of the texts discuss the relationships of the main characters with their families. Teachers can use these questions to guide discussion about the ideas trait: How does one author develop this idea through the course of the text as compared to another? How are characters developed to become round full beings instead of flat unrelatable characters? How does the writer develop their central theme? How effective are their choices?
In addition to considering questions such as these in each mentor text, students will learn about identifying a manageable topic, developing a central idea, showing versus telling in writing, using relevant details, and researching to help develop an idea.
Organization
Organization is the “internal structure of the piece, the thread of meaning, the logical pattern of ideas.”15 It is the backbone of a piece, what holds it together. This trait is often the most challenging for students to master because it is complex, but also because organization can be over taught.16 In schools, students are taught to write using very clearly defined structures for expository and analytical writing.17 There is the formulaic five-paragraph essay, and at our school, we use an acronym (TIQA – Topic sentence, Introduce and contextualize your quote, Quote, Analysis of the quote) to help students recognize the parts of an analytical paragraph. Though these methods help students on the following standardized test, their growth tends to plateau in subsequent years if they aren’t taught or encouraged to experiment with different writing structures.18
With all writing, but especially narrative writing, there is no one approach to organization. The mentor texts are all organized in different ways. For example, a few of the excerpts from Viola Davis’ memoir are linear in nature. They are told chronologically in order of what happened. Meanwhile, the piece from Trevor Noah’s memoir is arranged in a nonlinear structure. Students will compare the organizational structures of each of these pieces side by side, noting what they appreciate about each. Focusing on these two texts, there are the guiding questions I will ask: Did the writer organize their ideas by space, time, content, or perspective?19 How did each of the writers begin their pieces? What would you have done differently? How does each writer handle the development of their story? The ending? What did you like about the structure? What could have been done differently to enhance your understanding?
Students will have direct instruction on transitioning in writing and outlining. Some students will need a bit more support and want to mimic the structure of one of the mentor texts for their topic. None of the traits stand alone and as such, when teaching students about the beginnings of pieces, we need to consider unusual syntax (sentence fluency), personal connections (voice), literary devices (word choice), and unorthodox punctuation or capitalization (conventions).20 When students are ready to finalize the narrative of their choice, I will encourage them to return to their writing to play with organization by playing with the other traits at the beginning, middle, and end.
Sentence Fluency
Culham explains that sentence fluency is “the way the writing plays to the ear, not just to the eye.”21 It is the trait that immerses us in the piece by allowing us to hear it. Sentence fluency refers to both sentence length and sentence variety. It addresses the syntax and schemes of a piece, including tools such as parallel construction, alliteration, phrasing, logic, and word order.22 Culham argues that teaching sentence fluency is often challenging for students because of an emphasis on correctness over craft, a lack of examples from strong writing, and the fact that getting just the right sound is challenging.23 It takes both the eye and the ear to be able to construct evocative sentences.
By focusing on strong examples of writing through our mentor texts, we will be considering how the writers play with syntax, repetition, sentence length, and overall sentence construction. Some questions we’ll ask as we read are as follows: What do we like? What stands out to us? Two texts of focus will be Davis’ “Secret, Silent, Shame” and Ogle’s “Coupons.” Students will consider the effects of the authors’ choices of using short or long sentences in some scenes. They can consider the parallelism in Ogle’s piece and the impacts of it and the repetition in Davis’ piece.
This would also be a good point at which to look at some of the students’ previous writing and find ways to play with sentences. Perhaps they can add in a tricolon or play with anaphora or asyndeton? Maybe they’d like to flip a few sentences around because they don’t like the monotony of them? Furthermore, Klinkenborg suggests a technique for writers to write each of their sentences on one line in list form as if each were its own paragraph. It allows the writer to see if there is variety in the length of sentences, but they can also consider the beginnings and endings of their sentences.24 Finally, reading both the mentor texts, their own writing, and their peers’ writing aloud can help them hear where the trouble areas are and work on them.
Voice
Culham states simply that voice is “the soul of the piece” lending the writing authenticity.25 It makes the piece uniquely the writer’s own and shows their engagement with the piece.26 Students struggle with voice because it isn’t concrete, students are often taught to remove their voice from writing, and sometimes educators are afraid of assessing voice because it feels too personal. We’re afraid of making it seem as if we are assessing personality.27 The one area of writing in which we are open to thinking and talking about voice is narrative writing, though it should be included in all areas of writing.28
All of the mentor texts in this unit are pieces considering the writers’ childhoods, but the voices are very different. Zamora’s voice is the youngest. His narrator is a sensitive nine-year-old boy, and his voice comes through clearly through the author’s word choice and syntax. Ogle’s narrator is an 11-year-old boy whose fear and angst come through clearly in his writing. When placed next to Davis’ or Noah’s writing, we can see stark differences in voice. We see the vulnerability of all of the characters, but their voices are distinctive. Students can do side-by-side comparisons of each piece, reading them aloud if they need to, to hear the voice of the characters. Questions we will ask are as follows: What does each narrator’s voice sound like? Why? What is the writer doing to make the reader sound the way they do? Is it their choice of register? Is it the length of their sentences? Is it through repetition?
Students may decide to mimic a few of the voices or play on their own to see if they can find their own voice. It might be a good exercise for them to tell a story orally and record themselves and transcribe. They can see what they sound like and what their patterns of speech are. Another possibility is to write the same story in different voices of from several perspectives. How would a 16-year-old girl sound different from a 5 year-old? How about the voice of an elderly person or someone their parents’ age? Do they think these stories sound authentic?
Word Choice
Culham writes that word choice is, “about the use of rich, colorful, precise language that communicates not just in a functional way, but also in a way that moves and enlightens the reader.”29 Students struggle with word choice because language is often full of jargon or acronyms, vocabulary is often taught in isolation from writing, and students often overdo it when told to use interesting words.30 The goal of writing should be to make it as clear and evocative as possible. That means using words that are striking, exact, natural, and beautiful.31
Striking language is words or phrases that help to describe a person, place, thing, or idea in a way that the reader can visualize it. It includes the use of sensory imagery, metaphors, similes, personification, and a range of other figurative language to describe. Several of the mentor texts describe a narrator’s relationship to their family member through their description of that character. As we read through the texts, we will consider the following: How does a writer, through their description, show tension? How does a writer show a sense of safety? What words or phrases do they use that make you think this? Can you visualize the character in your mind?
Exact language means using precise nouns, vivid verbs, and appropriate modifiers. Students need to consider the specific circumstances of their narratives. They will ask themselves: Where does it take place? Are there words that are associated with that place? Does their narrative describe an activity? If so, what words are associated with it? How can they replace dry verbs with more interesting ones? Is it time to dig out the thesaurus? What synonyms are there that are more specific to the activity? Have you been judicious in your use of adjectives? Are the adjectives powerful enough to stand up to the nouns? Students will consider the contexts of each of the mentor texts and see which verbs, nouns, and adjectives the writers chose to describe the setting and situation.
Natural language is simply authentic-sounding language. When considering mentor texts, their peers’ writing, and their own writing, they will consider the following: Do the characters sound like real people? Is it too repetitive in a bad way? Finally, students should look to elevate their writing through the use of colorful words and phrases. They will consider the mentor texts. What language stands out as particularly evocative? What moves did the writer make to get there?
Conventions
The purpose of conventions is to “help guide the reader through text and make ideas readable.”32 It is the trait most associated with editing instead of revision. Culham compares conventions to “good table manners of written language” as strong conventions ultimately allow the reader to focus on the five craft traits. She cautions teachers to help students see grammar and punctuation as writing tools, not as the be all end all in a piece of writing.33 Teachers struggle to know how to best teach conventions and also don’t encourage risk taking because of fears of parent backlash.34 She points out something that I have often noticed in my classroom -- sometimes students are so afraid of getting it “right” that they are too afraid to try writing at all.35 If we encourage students to take grammatical risks, we will see its impact on the rest of their writing traits, especially sentence fluency. Lastly, Culham argues that putting too much faith in rote writing curricula divorces conventions from writing, so it is not “sticky.”36
Before teaching this unit, I plan to review capitalization and periods and will also do some sentence diagramming to understand the parts of a sentence and dependent and independent clauses. It’s better to know the rules before you break them! After learning the rules, we will practice breaking them with fragments and possibly misplaced modifiers.
For the purposes of this unit, I will focus on teaching active versus passive voice, verb tense consistency, and how to punctuate dialogue. We will look at the mentor texts to examine how the writers both obey and break conventions. Questions we will ask as we read are as follows: Why do they make the choices they do? How do they punctuate dialogue? Why use active voice? When do they use passive voice?
Presentation
This is the +1 of the 6+1 traits of writing. Presentation is the aesthetics of a piece of writing. Teachers should consider how they want the final student product to look. This means considering margins, spacing, use of white space, and formatting considerations. Since this unit is focused on the content of the paper, I leave it up to each teacher to decide how they want their students to present their final pieces.
Mentor Texts
Given my school’s population, I have chosen texts that will work as both mirrors, texts that reflect the reader’s own experiences, and windows, narratives that show the reader a different perspective, for my students, while also demonstrating strong examples of each trait. Below is a discussion of both the texts and my intended usage of them regarding writing techniques and traits. Specifics about how classroom writing assignments will be assigned and assessed are included in the classroom activities section. I will also obtain multiple copies of each of these memoirs for my classroom. Students who are interested or need a little bit of a stretch will be encouraged to check out one of the memoirs to read in its entirety.
Javier Zamora’s Solito
Solito is a memoir translated from Spanish about Zamora’s harrowing three-month journey as an undocumented nine-year-old child traveling without any of his family from El Salvador to the United States. Excerpts from this memoir will speak to all of my students. For some, it will serve as a mirror and for others as a window into the lives of their peers. The story is divided into large chapters separated by dates.
“Chapter One: March 16, 1999”
Zamora begins the book with the word “trip,” and the word is repeated throughout the scene to emphasize its significance in Javier’s life. Zamora uses descriptive internal monologues to expand on his hopes and fears about the trip. He is desperate to reunite with his parents. In it, he uses beautiful sensory imagery and similes to describe his abuelita.37 Through his description, we get a sense of their relationship. Students will compare the descriptions and use of figurative language in this piece to Reg Ogle’s “Family” to build further fluency in the word choice trait.
“Chapter 3: Twenty Strangers on a Boat in the Dark”[38]
The piece is full of descriptive language. The mix of Spanish and English in addition to repetition and onomatopoeia build suspense. The excerpt is short enough for students to read and analyze in one class period, and they will be able to go back into it and do a little mimicry. Students could practice writing a suspenseful scene with a focus on word choice and playing with sentence length. The goal would be for them to use vivid verbs and precise nouns that are specific to the setting and situation, while playing with long and short sentences to build suspense.
Rex Ogle’s Free Lunch
Free Lunch is Rex Ogle’s memoir of his sixth-grade year. It won an “Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction” award from the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American Library Association (YALSA-ALA) and is a riveting story of Ogle’s sixth-grade experience of being part of the free lunch program, as are all students at MacFarland. Like Zamora and Viola Davis, he experienced poverty and violence, but his perspective and experiences are very different. The book is written in short vignettes of two to five pages in length, and the language is written in a low register. It is accessible to most middle school readers. Given the length of each chapter, we will use several of his vignettes in class.
“Coupons”
“Coupons,” the opening vignette of Free Lunch, begins with Rex, our narrator, and his mother going grocery shopping. Rex’s stomach is growling because there was nothing to eat for breakfast and he is trying to persuade his mother to let him buy at least one item at the grocery store that he wants. Through the use of dialogue, which is part of the voice and sentence fluency traits, we learn a great deal about the dynamics of their relationship and Rex’s desperation. Ogle uses a low register and several interesting literary devices to illustrate the tension. Part of an internal monologue he has is, “But some days---some days I hate my life, and I feel like fighting. Fighting my mom, fighting other kids, fighting the world.”39 Students can recognize a tricolon that is also an example of asyndeton and some cacophonous alliteration to escalate the aggression. A tricolon is a sentence that uses three parallel phrases in sequence for emphasis. Asyndeton is a term referring to the elimination of conjunctions for dramatic effect. Alliteration is the repetition of the first consonant sound of a series of words. If something is cacophonous, it means that it is harsh to the ear. Later, Ogle expresses his hunger through a run-on list employing asyndeton, followed by a short punchy sentence, “And I can’t get any of it.”40 These are excellent examples of the ideas and sentence fluency traits. The last third of the piece is all internal monologue exploring the relationship between poverty, shame, and anger. This portion would be an excellent piece to put next to Davis’ “Secret, Silent, Shame” to compare the authorial choices of each writer regarding their descriptions of poverty and quality of life.
Students will write an analytical paragraph describing how Ogle develops his main idea in “Coupons.” Furthermore, after reading this vignette, students would write a narrative in which they describe a moment of desperation using listing and asyndeton.
“Middle School” and “Family”
“Middle School” and “Family” are the next two vignettes in the memoir. “Middle School” is short and gives the reader more background about Rex’s home life as he prepares for middle school. He learns that he will be part of the free lunch program, which is clearly significant in this book given its title.41
“Family” is full of beautiful language and a nice play on short and long sentences. We are given more information about Rex’s stepfather, his prejudice and abusive nature, and we also learn about Rex’s feelings of inferiority as a result of his family’s financial struggles. Rex is the primary caregiver for his toddler half-brother and through a mix of long and short sentences, we understand his mixed feelings about serving this role.
I have to watch Ford all the time, and take care of him too. Every day, I make his food, let him watch dumb baby shows instead of my shows and play with him and stuff. I’m trying to teach him to read, and he can, a little. He’s real smart. But when he doesn’t get his way, he screams bloody murder! It’s so annoying. I’m glad I finally potty trained him. Now I don’t have to change his diapers anymore. That was disgusting.42
Students will read both “Middle School” and “Family” together, with a specific focus on word choice. The pieces are full of hyperboles, similes, and imagery. Students will analyze how Ogle develops the characters of his family members over these two vignettes.
Students will then read the “March 16, 1999” excerpt from Javier Zamora’s Solito with an eye for word choice. The writing assignment for this class will be to write a narrative about their family, one family member or their whole household, using figurative language. The figurative language should reflect how they feel about their family or that particular family member. They can also choose to play with long and short sentences to show their mixed emotions about that family member.
“Lunch Money”: Chapter 3 of Rex Ogle’s Free Lunch
Ogle starts his first day of middle school with a black eye from his mother and no lunch money. He immediately has to deal with concerned and wary looks from his teachers and classmates and has to navigate telling the half-deaf lunch lady. He is thoroughly embarrassed about having to tell her he is in the free lunch program and due to her hearing issue, he’s forced to announce his status to the entire lunch room. Ogle plays with sentence length to move his character through embarrassing moments and internal dialogue, using longer sentences to build the tension and progressively more descriptive language illustrating how he is feeling.
Students will mimic this technique in a narrative where they will write about a moment of five minutes or less when they were embarrassed, nervous, or afraid. They will need to slow down the moment by showing the scene through details and longer sentences and then speeding up the action with shorter sentences.
Viola Davis’ Finding Me
The memoir of acclaimed actress Viola Davis, Finding Me is a deeply personal dive into her childhood and the triumphs and trauma that shaped her. Davis and her siblings grew up as part of a handful of Black children in the very white city of Central Falls, Rhode Island. In addition to the challenges of facing racism from her peers and her teachers, Davis was trying to survive the very real everyday trauma of living in abject poverty with a physically abusive father and a sexually abusive older brother. This memoir is a story of perseverance and is broken up into chapters that serve as short stories about an aspect of her life. For the purpose of the unit, we will examine a few of these chapters in comparison with other works that share similar themes.
Chapter 1: “Running”
"Running" describes Viola Davis’ experience with racialized bullying in her Rhode Island hometown. It’s full of action and intense emotion describing an experience that defined who she was for most of her life. The writing is engaging and relatable and full of color with a lot of writing techniques that students will enjoy identifying and documenting and experimenting with, including alliteration, anaphora, unusual syntactical structures, and a great deal of subtle character and theme development.
Students will explore the ideas, sentence fluency, and word choice traits in this piece. We will also use this text in comparison with a few other texts to examine voice and ideas, since all of the texts discuss internal and external conflicts regarding family relationships. This discussion would also serve as an excellent writing opportunity for students. They will write a piece that uses anaphora and alliteration to describe their own relationships with a specific family member.
Chapter 8: “Secret, Silent, Shame”
In “Secret, Silent, Shame,” Davis illustrates the poverty and violence of her childhood using clear and simple language. She sets up the beginning of the piece by showing how she would fall asleep at school, her one refuge, and then explains the why. She writes, “If I got two hours of full sleep, I was lucky. We’d be awakened by a scream, a screech...Imagine your father beating your mom with a two-by-four piece of wood, slamming it on her back, the screams for help, the screams of anger and rage.”43 Her sibilant language emphasizes the hiss of pain and constant danger in her household. The repetition of “screams” emphasizes Davis’ terror that her mother would be killed by her father. She then goes on to describe the physical and psychological consequences on her, including wetting the bed until she was fourteen, and falling asleep in class.
Davis uses anaphora and dialogue to show how she and her siblings were bullied and ignored and forced to live without a loving intervention while they dealt with regular trauma. The writer’s treatment of poverty is an excellent focus for discussion and analysis in this chapter, and we can compare this with a few of the pieces from Rex Ogle and potentially Trevor Noah’s “RUN.”
Students will practice writing a narrative where they are showing instead of telling, part of the ideas trait. The piece will explore more about something about them that we can’t see, just as no one could see Davis’ home life, but saw the consequences of it on her physical presence in school. Students will be encouraged to use repetition in some form, part of the sentence fluency and word choice traits.
Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime:“RUN”: Chapter 1
Born a Crime, South African comedian and television personality, Trevor Noah’s, memoir describes the author’s life as a biracial child in South African during apartheid. Like Davis’ “Running,” “RUN” packs a punch with its leading paragraph. The structure of this piece is different because Noah begins each chapter of his book with a prologue to contextualize South African history and then tells a story that connects to it in some way.
“RUN” begins with Noah describing how his mother pushed him out of a moving bus after their regular Sunday ritual of attending nine hours of church services at every conceivable type of church in the Apartheid Era. The narrative weaves in and out of the main story, finally coming to the reason why she threw him out of the bus.
Students will be engaged in this piece because they will be curious to find out what happened to Noah. They will be able to explore the nonlinear structure in combination with the prologue and a primary source document about the anti-miscegenation laws in South Africa. Given that this chapter and Davis’ “Running” both deal with necessary escapes, this would be a good time for students to discuss the differences in the writers’ voices and styles. They will also compare the organizational structures of each. While both have a bit of a prologue, Noah is telling several stories at once, while Davis tells a linear dialogue.
Students will write a narrative in which they use a non-linear structure to discuss an exciting moment in their lives.
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