My Favorite Writing Mini-Lesson

I got to do one of my favorite writing mini-lessons this week. And it wasn’t just the one lesson: I also saw how as I get more conscious and consistent regarding reading like a writer and writing like a reader, articulating it for my students and scaffolding it into my class using mentor sentences, the students are taking on those values and practices.

My favorite writing mini-lesson targets using a variety of sentence lengths. Students start by doing a quick write (5-10 minutes). Then I share a passage from Gary Provost’s book 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing that both urges and models the intentional orchestration of sentence length to create an effect. After that, students open the novel we’re reading to a given page, and read it looking for sentence lengths—longest, shortest, how they’re arranged, and what the effect is—to discuss with their table group of 3 or 4. Finally, they go back to their original quick write and revise it to make one sentence particularly short and one particularly long, sharing their work in their table groups when they are done.

The book we are currently reading in AP Language is The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. The purpose is to master the style of satire, and for the final assessment students will write a new letter from Screwtape to a junior tempter in the field whose “patient” is not an adult in 1941 England, but a teen at our school in 2018. So as we read and discuss, we are always thinking about what we might write. Previously we had listed the human vices and follies that Lewis has mocked so far, and added to the list any additional ones we notice in our context. The prompt for the quick write, therefore, was to select a vice or folly from that list that you are considering writing about, and explore what you are thinking about it.

The passage I use to introduce students to the purpose and possibilities of varying sentence length is as follows: 

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create must. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium  length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important. (qtd. in Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools 91). 

It’s great to see the students really engaging—discussing with each other the effects of Lewis’s arrangement of sentence lengths and then returning to their own writing to try to do the same.

As the students (as well as the teacher) see the value of this reading/writing connection, good mini-lessons beget good mini-lessons. Here are some of the others I used this unit:

1. Semicolons to highlight parallelism, antithesis, and the juxtaposition of satire. Mentor sentence: “He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them” (25). In subsequent discussion, a student noted the same effect in the following sentence: “We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons” (39).
2. Introductory appositives. Mentor sentence: “The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives, and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it—all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition” (153). In discussion we noted that this structure both emphasizes the list by placing it first, and leaves the reader feeling the worn out-ness spoken of in the sentence by the time she gets to the statement of it. Then we tried writing our own sentences on the model: “x, y, and z—all this had worn me out by the end of last week.”
3. Ending appositives. Mentor sentence: “This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s motives for creating a dangerous world—a world in which moral issues really come to the point” (160). Sentence frame to try: The human vice/foible about which I think I might write is ___—[noun clause further describing the named vice/foible]. My model try: The human foible about which I think I might write is false modesty—the way humans try to convince themselves of falsehoods concerning their gifts.

It almost goes without saying that avid readers tend to be better writers. I’ve been an avid reader all my life, and I think I’ve become an even better writer as I’ve worked on moving the reading/writing connection from a subconscious level to a conscious level. How do I do this? I notice effective writing moves, bring them to students’ attention, do some direct instruction, have them look for additional examples, and both model emulating and ask students to emulate those moves. The process may seem forced at first, but as I stick with it, it becomes more and more natural. It’s definitely worth it when I see the lights go on in students’ minds as they become conscious of this as well. The best resources I’ve found to help me on the journey are Voice Lessons, Mechanically Inclined, and Writing Tools.

What is your experience personally and/or in your classroom with reading as a writer and writing as a reader?