Understanding essay writing is critical for teachers, students, readers, and writers. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), a famous essayist, defined an essay this way: “The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.” That’s a great...
In one of my favorite informal experiments, Professor Arthur A. Stern removed the paragraph breaks from a section of text from “Fundamentals of Good Writing” (1950) and had English teachers reparagraph it. Only 5 out of 100 teachers reparagraphed it as the original...
UNITY is one of the more important concepts in writing. What’s unity? Well, unity is oneness. In writing, unity is oneness of purpose. We can sum up unity in writing with one question: What’s your point? Everything must speak to that point in some way to achieve unity...
Students want to know, “Why doesn’t every paragraph have a topic sentence? How do real writers create paragraphs?” Do you see topic sentences in all of the paragraphs you read? Well, it’s not your imagination. Not all paragraphs have topic sentences. This is not just...
As a rule, I use the term narrator for narratives, and the term speaker for most other types of writing, especially academic writing. Although the narrator is always the speaker in a narrative, the speaker is probably not narrating (i.e., telling what happened) in...
Writing is a skill. This means that teachers can teach an enormous amount of information about writing and still not improve their students’ writing. To be fair, informational knowledge about writing is extremely important and valuable: 1. It helps students with...
Everything in teaching writing comes down to time. The most serious discussions on actually improving students’ writing (not just teaching writing) focus primarily on time. Furthermore, the teaching-writing research and philosophies also address how teachers should...
Would you like to know how to teach writing more effectively? Would you like to be a better writing teacher? If you download and read the free teaching-writing resources found on this page, you will definitely be the best writing teacher at your school! Of course, I’m...
I learned and became fluent in a second language as an adult. Not only was I an adult, but I was a full-time teacher as well. I’m going to take you through my process of learning a language. As teachers, we are inundated with constant quotes about what the research...
If you follow this nine-sentence blueprint, you will be the best writing teacher at your school. If you teach beginning writers or struggling writers and use Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay, you will be even more effective. ⁄ ⁄ ⁄ ⁄ ⁄ ⁄ ⁄ ⁄ ⁄ ⁄ ⁄ ⁄ ⁄ ⁄...
Beginning, middle, and ending is so important in teaching kids to write that I created an acronym for it: BME. Clearly, I’m not trying to be creative with that acronym. I just use the term so often that I need an acronym for it. Over the centuries, humans have come up...
Teaching writing is easy, right? Just turn the page in the textbook or workbook. If only it were that simple! Most teachers think that teaching writing is hard, and if they don’t think that, then they strongly believe that teaching writing is an art. This situation...
Do you want to improve your students’ writing? Well, don’t teach grammar. I’m serious. Teaching grammar does not improve student writing. I will never forget the year that I devoted an unreasonable amount of class time to teaching grammar with the hope that students...
