Improving Skills

With practice, students come to enjoy writing. I ask my students to write ten minutes a day seven days a week. That is the secret to their success. During our sessions together, we start with #1 below and move along the continuum as needed. If older students want special coaching for exams, college essay writing, etc., I’m happy to do that as well.

1. Free-writing
During the first session, we practice this skill. It is fun, easy, and the great writing always inspires students to want to write more.

2. Conventions
Once students are comfortable spilling their words onto their page, I nudge them gently into punctuation to clarify meaning. Capital letters, commas, and periods fall into place when the writer wants their ideas to come across clearly. This motivation comes from the writer.

3. Organization and Sentence Fluency
Fluent writing is graceful and easy to read. Sentences vary in structure and length and each one flows into the next. Once students feel comfortable with their writing, they enjoy playing with word order, dependent and independent phrases, and challenging themselves to write really long labyrinthine sentences next to short abrupt ones. It becomes a game and a challenge!

Organization is the internal structure of a piece of writing. As students begin to write longer pieces they need to think of the framework that holds it all together. Writers must ask themselves where to begin, what comes next, what’s after that, and how do I tie it all up in the end. This is “Organization”.

4. Word Choice and Voice
These traits fall into place as writing practice continues. When writers become fluent and relaxed and confident, their writer’s voice evolves and they become more interested in words. I encourage students to notice word choice and voice as they read books. This is how reading improves writing.

5. Modes of Writing
Students should be able to write narrative, expository, persuasive, and imaginative essays by fifth grade. There are specific skills writers need in order to do this well.

6. Writing on Demand (grades 7 and up)
Whether it’s a written test in Social Studies, a timed essay in Writing Class, or part of the SAT, students today need to be able to look at a prompt, organize their ideas quickly, and write an essay in a given amount of time. As Anne Ruggles Gere so aptly puts it, “Today, writing on demand is not an occasional, in-some-cases situation, but an omnipresent one that faces all our students at all levels of skill and ability.”

One to One Coaching

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Older students frequently ask me for help with a specific writing task — such as a homework assignment, a job application, or an essay for a college application. I love to inspire creative expression and help others figure out how best to present their thoughts and ideas.This may take one session, or, as with one of my former students working on college applications, three months of writing and rewriting and polishing several essays before deciding on the one to hand in.

Home School Groups

 

 

 

 

 

While living in Ashland, Oregon from 2004 to 2010, I worked with middle and high school age youth who were being home schooled. We met together for two hours once a week, and students wrote extensively at home over the six days in between. Classes I offered were:

1. Brass Tacks of Writing
This “basic skills” class focuses on Conventions and Sentence Structure. Once students understand how periods, commas, quotation marks, etc. work, they love using them to enhance their writing.

2. Writing to a Prompt
This class focuses how to develop ideas to write about. Students learn to take a simple prompt and turn it into a well crafted paragraph, poem, or an essay or story.

3. Writing on Demand
This class teaches students how to construct a tight writing piece when under time constraints.

4. Playing with Poetry
This is an exploration of poetry…reading it, enjoying it, and writing it. I do not teach structured poetry; this is poetry without rules…free verse with an emphasis on word choice. It is a lot of fun to write poetry!

5. Bookmaking
To culminate a full term of writing, I often have students publish their writing pieces in handmade books constructed in class. This, more than any other form of motivation, incentivizes young writers to tidy up their work so it is ready to “go public”!