Lessons That Change Writers: Lessons with Electronic Binder, 2nd edition

Published by Pearson (April 3, 2017) © 2017

Paperback

ISBN-13: 9780325088303
Lessons That Change Writers: Lessons with Electronic Binder
Published 2017

Title overview

In Lessons That Change Writers, Nancie has narrowed and deepened her conversation with teachers, to focus on the minilesson as a vehicle for helping students improve their writing. She shares over a hundred of these writing lessons, which are described by her students as “the best of the best.”

The lessons fall into the following four categories that provide the structure for this book:
  • Lessons about Topics: ways to develop ideas for pieces of writing that will matter to writers and to their readers
  • Lessons about Principles of Writing: ways to think and write deliberately to create literature
  • Lessons about Genre: in which we observe and name the ways that good free verse poems, formatted poetry, essays, short stories, memoirs, thank-you letters, profiles, parodies, and book reviews work
  • Lessons about Conventions: what readers' eyes and minds have been trained to expect, and how marks and forms function to give writing more voice and power and to make reading predictable and easy.
Lessons That Change Writers includes:
  • A book with over a hundred minilessons, along with the theory behind each lesson
  • Online Resources that include of hundreds of reproducibles:
  • overheads of principles, approaches, rules, and examples
  • readings for your students
  • classroom posters of essential quotations for aspiring writers
  • examples of work by Nancie's kids—student writings that illustrate the lessons and will instruct and inspire your student writers

Table of contents

Introduction
Mini-lesson Basics
Section 1: Lessons About Topics
  • Writing Territories: Launching the Writing Workshop
  • Questions for Memoirists
  • Heart Mapping
  • Where Poetry Hides
  • Problems to Explore in Fiction
  • Twenty Actions
  • Itches to Scratch in Essays
Section 2: Lessons About Principles
  • What is Writing?
  • The Rule of So What?
  • Thoughts and Feelings
  • The Rule of Write about a Pebble
  • Narrative Leads
  • Good Titles
  • Polishing
  • Final Copies: What Readers Need
  • Thinking on Paper: Planning Sheets
  • Can a Reader See It, Hear It, Feel It?
  • A Movie behind Your Eyelids
  • How a Thesaurus Can Help
Troubleshooting: Surefire Ways to Weaken Your Writing
    • The Really Bad Words
    • Too-Long and Too-Short Paragraphs
    • The Missing I
    • Passive Sentences
    • Exclamation Points
    • Hopefully
    • Stories That End "The End"
    • Hopefully
    • Stories That End "The End"
Section 3: Lessons About Genres
  • Ineffective and Effective Memoirs
A Course of Study: Fiction
A Course of Study: How Free-Verse Poetry Works
    • What's Easy about Writing Bad Fiction?
    • What's Hard about Writing Good Fiction?
    • The Main Character Questionnaire
    • Considerations in Creating a Character
    • Short Story Structure
    • Ways to Develop a Character
    • The Power of I
    • Beware the Participle
    • Leads: Begin Inside
  • Conclusions: End Strongly
  • Breaking Lines and Stanzas and Punctuating
  • Cut to the Bone
  • Use Repetition
  • Two Things at Once
Troubleshooting: Some Poetic Forms
    • Sestinas and Tritinas
    • Irregular Odes
    • Haiku
    • Thirteen-Ways Poems
    • Memoir Poems
  • Gifts of Writing
  • Effective Book Reviews
A Course of Study: Essays
    • Effective Essays: Teasing Out Criteria
    • How Do I Scratch the Itch?
    • Write with Information
    • Order the Information
    • Leads for an Essay
    • Experiment with Essay Conclusions
  • Ted L. Nancy Letters and Other Genres for Humorists
  • Test Writing as a Genre
Section 4: Lessons About Conventions
  • The Individual Proofreading List
  • Busines Letter Format and Addressing an Envelope
  • A Brief History of the English Language
Troubleshooting: Spelling Essentials
    • Weekly Word Studies
    • Personal Survival Words
    • Proofreading for Spelling
    • The Truth about I before E
    • Some Foreign Words Used in English Texts
    • Root Words and Prefixes
    • Suffixes: To Double or Not?
    • Other Suffix Rules That Mostly Work
  • A Brief History of Some Common Punctuation Marks
  • Essential Punctuation Information
Troubleshooting: Convention Confusions
    • How to Correct Coma Splices
    • How to Punctuate Dialogue
    • Homonyms
    • Four Capitlization Confusions
    • Writing Numbers
    • Indicating Titles
    • Me or I?
Appendixes
  1. Student Memoirs
  2. Student Short Fiction
  3. Student Essays
  4. Student Book Reviews
  5. Resources for Writing Mini-lessons

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