Thinking about the simple things

I wanted to teach my class of 7th graders the very simple and basic difference between a common and proper noun.  They should already know this, so I considered the lesson largely to be review. I drew a line down the middle of the board and asked the students to name nouns while I directed [...]

Learning The Craft of Writing

In my earlier posts on What is Writing, I suggested that we have to attend to two elements of writing to become something like a great writer. Let me qualify that statement. Even if you want to be a good writer, it will happen to the extent that you attend to these two elements. They are drawn [...]

Teaching the Transcendent

If you go to the comments from my post What is Writing you’ll see a reply from Chris in which she asks: “Can we teach the transcendent part, the soul part, or only model it.” Chris, I think you know you were throwing sardines to a seal, don’t you? This is like when you are teaching [...]

What is Writing

I love literature and history and ideas and letters and even blogs. I love the flow of information and narrative and personality that writing enables. Plus, I teach and practice writing. Consequently, I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes for good writing, and that leads me, in turn, to wonder about just what [...]

Assessment and Feedback for a Written Composition

The Teacher’s guide for level II of The Lost Tools of Writing has been demanding an inordinate amount of my time these past few weeks so it’s been difficult to enter any sort of a lengthy post in here (to the relief of many of you, I’m sure). In particular, I’ve been writing about assessment [...]