Category: Uncategorized
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How College Essays Taught Me the Importance of an Authentic Audience
It is the heart of college application season in my school, which means one thing: college essay after college essay after college essay walking through my door. It would not be hyperbolic to say that I have looked at well over 100 different college essays in the last three weeks, many of them two, three,…
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Writing Should be Taught and Caught
“In too many classrooms, we assign and assess writing without teaching the craft of it.” –Penny Kittle The first time I heard about parallel structure, limiting one’s use of linking verbs, and different sentence types, I was only a couple months from earning an English B.A. from the University of Michigan. If not for one…
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How to Hold Writing Conferences When You Have 165 Students
This is the third in my series of posts leading up to my NCTE Ignite Talk on how to be as effective and efficient as possible with feedback to student writing. If you want to read the first post on when teachers should provide feedback during the writing process and the second on how much feedback…
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Words Matter
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” -Mark Twain Words are the molecules of language. They are small, complicated building blocks that come together to form something so complex that it feels like magic that it…
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Responding Smarter, Not Harder, to Student Writing #2: How Much Feedback Should Teachers Give on a Single Paper?
This is the excerpt for a featured content post.
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How to Get Students to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Writing
In an earlier post, I discussed why most students tend to not like writing. In short, it is generally because writing is so complex that it maxes out our attention and working memory. Our brains are highly suspicious of anything that hard, and so while writing (or doing any other intense mental activity for that…
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Planning for Success: Four Prewriting Activities That Can Jumpstart Student Writing
As a student, I hated being required to show my work in math class. If I could produce the correct answer at the end, why should it matter how I came to it? Of course, now that I am a teacher, I understand that while seeing the students’ processes does help teachers, it is not…
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Writing Is Revising
“Published authors know that revision is the heart of producing effective writing…Developing writers don’t know this. They think of revising as a chore assigned because they aren’t good writers and can’t get their writing right the first time.” –Kathleen Dudden Rowlands in “Slay the Monster! Replacing Form-First Pedagogy with Effective Writing Instruction”
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The Problems and Power of Peer Response: How to Get Students Deeply Engaging With Each Other’s Writing
For the first five years of my career, nothing frustrated me more than peer response. On the surface, peer response seemed like the likely answer to what I believe is writing instruction’s hardest question: we know that direct personal feedback is essential in the writing instruction process, but how is one teacher supposed to offer regular…
Matthew M. Johnson 