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

From the Publisher

Inspired by the definitive thoughts and teachings of Thomas Newkirk, professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, and his seminal monograph, Critical Thinking and Writing: Reclaiming the Essay, Gretchen Bernabei has authored the perfect successor. Reviving the Essay: How to Teach Structure Without Formula offers hungry students and teachers alike a compendium of ideas, prompts, and approaches to engage students in the process of uncovering deeper meaning and serving their own personal voices as writers. Discover Writing Press welcomes this invaluable book to its roster. Reviving the Essay is a writing teacher's treasure trove of 30 lessons and is designed to assist and encourage teachers 4-12 to help students dig beneath bland, superficial responses and find that spark and uniqueness that will emerge in their writing. Here's a book long over-due.

From the Author

"We have to take what we know and rebuild. Newkirk gave me the mental image for my shifting essay metaphor. The schoolified essay is a building, already finished at the beginning; the real essay is a journey that goes somewhere. Whereas the schoolified essay asks students to start with a conclusion, a thesis, and use the rest of the paper to "back it up," the real essay offers a journey for the reader, or it doesn't work. So do we find a better formula? A whole lot of formulas, so students can choose? The animated discussion around the lunch table at school led my friend Marcus Goodyear to jot down this thought on a napkin:'Teachers and writers often seem to be on a quest to find the ultimate template or genre or list of rules, devices, how-tos, so that we can find the tools to explain our process and train new artists. But artists don't start with a universal template or genre. Sometimes they/we start by imitating--using one work as a template. Every work of art must be so unique that it becomes its own template.'"

Edition details

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