(Classroom Artifact) Say/Do 7: Reading Like a Writer

Daniels and Steineke - Mini-Lessons For Literature Circles
Ray - Wondrous Words

Say

This week's readings have been helpful for me in understanding how to get students to think about the craft of writing without bogging them down with dozens of literary devices all at once.  I learned my creative writing style from emulating author's I enjoyed reading, not from any specific lesson or teacher.  Developing a sense of style takes time, borrowing, mix and matching, experimentation, and failure.  It didn't take me long to figure out that writing anything completely, stone-faced serious was difficult for me to do well in any authentic way.  A lot of my academic writing contains so much fat and filler it makes me feel bloated thinking about it, but I hate writing that goes on and on and on, with paragraphs that never end and arguments that go in circles rather than getting to the point.  But I emulate that dribble because it fills pages.

Ray's rundown of the differences between teaching prescriptively and descriptively were very helpful for me.  Particularly because I was asked to create and teach a grammar mini-lesson for next week.  My coaching teacher's freshman class use a lot of run-on sentences and have issues with basic sentence formatting like capitalization and punctuation, so here I am wondering how to teach things like coordinating conjunctions and FANBOYS and whether I actually needed a comma for ",so here I am..."  Oh and semi-colons which I refrain from using because of their wishy washy ambivalence.

I likely will try out the Mentor Sentence strategy for my students, and find a strong sentence that features some of the craft elements that my CT wants them to learn.  In my previous placement, that CT also used Mentor Sentences, but they became a weekly thing that had a chunk of time set aside for students work on them daily.  I feel sort of semi-colonesque about Mentor Sentences becoming a daily routine, although much of my worry about the strategy comes from students not making sense of the STAR method (Substitute, Take Out, Add, and Rearrange) my CT tacked on to Mentor Sentences.  Some sentences really made little to no sense for these language manipulation exercises, which led to many students losing sight of the fundamentals that were the focus of the strategy.

Do

Mentor Sentence

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. (Vonnegut)."  From Mother Night.

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that" (King).  From Strength to Love.

Step One

Consider the following:

·     What do you notice about the sentence?

·     What do you like about the sentence?

·     What do you think the author's intent is for this sentence?

·     What do you notice about the author’s craft in particular?

Step Two:  Find another! 

Step Three:  Imitation!