Reviving The Essay: How To Teach Structure Without Formula - Softcover

Bernabei, Gretchen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1931492131 ISBN 13: 9781931492133

Publisher: Discover Writing Pr, 2005

Synopsis

In his foreword to Reviving the Essay, Thomas Newkirk praises Gretchen Bernabei's fresh approach to teaching essay writing. Loaded with student examples and reproducible forms, the 30 lessons in Reviving the Essay will "supercharge" your students' minds with patterns and ideas that will transform their esays from lockstep, generic assignments to well-considered opinions offered in authentic, creative voices.

About this title

About the Author

Gretchen Bernabei has taught in San Antonio public schools for 20 years. She has conducted writing workshops for enthusiastic teacher audiences for the past 17 years. She co-authored, with Barry Lane, Why We Must Run With Scissors: Voice Lessons in Persuasive Writing and authored Lightning in a Bottle: Visual Prompts for Insights, a companion CD-ROM containing 266 visual prompts.

From the Inside Flap

Foreword by Thomas Newkirk (abridged) The book you now hold, Gretchen Bernabei's Reviving the Essay, does more than any other book I know to help teachers reimagine what an essay can be. I suspect that it will have more impact than many earlier critiques because it really offers alternatives, dozens of inviting opportunities for students to develop their thinking. For me a true measure of a great teaching book (like Kirby and Liner's Inside Out or Heard's Writing Toward Home) is their capacity to motivate, that gut feeling that says 'I'd like to try this.' This book passes that test.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

If my English Journal introduction to the powers of thick description didn't cause me to snap in 1991 (see the introduction), then Harvey Daniels's voice in my ear should have in 2002. In "Expository Text in Literature Circles" from the May 2002 Voices from the Middle, Daniels looks at the way we teach expository writing, in pure forms: cause/effect compare/contrast pro/con problem/solution definition/categorization order/sequence/procedure description/listing Yep, those sound like the kinds of nonfiction we learned in school, and which we have taught. The Daniels examines several newspaper stories. Lo and behold, they are full of dialogue, characters, vignettes, sounds, images. It's not a surprise to us as readers that real world nonfiction does not stick to pure textbook expository forms any more than real-world driveway-moment-type essays stick to a five-paragraph essay formula. No! They're full of all the elements of fiction. They're full of all the elements, I'm recognizing now, of really engaging field notes. Thick description.

Edition details

• Publisher: Discover Writing Pr
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1931492131
• ISBN 13: 9781931492133
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 183