The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students’ Thinking and Writing

The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students’ Thinking and Writing, by Linda Rief

I want students to flourish not only as readers but also as writers. I want them to become people who are confident, competent, fluent at accessing information about the world through reading, processing it through discussion, and communicating in writing. 

I don’t want students to fear writing, find it paralyzing, and feel intimidated. I want them to enjoy the mastery of words—arranging the right ones in the right way to communicate to another person exactly what they want to say exactly how the other person will best hear it.

How can I help students overcome writing reluctance, accumulate a store of idea nuggets, accrue practice experimenting with craft moves, connect reading and writing, develop confidence and fluency, and identify as writers? In The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students’ Thinking and Writing, Linda Rief suggests daily 2-3 minute quickwrites in response to short, compelling mentor texts. By short she means less than a page. The point is less to study the mentor text (see previous post on A Teacher’s Guide to Mentor Texts) and more to see how someone else has captured an idea and use it to spark your own rapid, first draft response.
 
The book opens with an 18-page introduction, and the remainder is, as the title promises, 100 actual 1-page mentor texts the author uses with classes of students and educators, each with 2-4 response prompts (“Try This”), and sometimes examples of how a response has eventually been revised into a larger piece. 

The “Try This” response prompts give the writer several options to explore “as quickly and as specifically as you can for 2-3 minutes.” Generally they include the following 3 types: 

• Write about anything this text makes you think of.
• Pick a line from the text to continue in your own vein.
• Experiment with a craft choice: change the point of view, follow a structure, use all 5 senses…

Sometimes a fuller prompt is given—I think this would be helpful especially when initially using this approach, to introduce students to the ways they can use a text for inspiration. Here’s an example of the prompts in response to an excerpt from the novel in verse The Running Dream by Wendell Van Draanen (Rief 23):

• Write out anything this excerpt brings to mind for you.
• Think about something you are passionate about (something that “airs out your soul,” “makes you feel alive”) and write down everything that makes this activity so important to you.
• Start with the line “I AM A ___” and fill in the blank, describing all that you do, think, feel, experience while doing this activity.
• Change the line to “I am not a ___,” expanding on all the reasons why you are not.
• Her last two lines say she will never run again. What has stopped you from doing something you love doing?

I’m intrigued by this idea. I’d like to experiment with doing it for at least a unit. I think it would loosen up some students who stare at a blank page without writing. (Rief says when a student can absolutely not think of anything to write, tell them to copy the mentor text for the 2-3 minutes.) At the same time, I think it would inspire some students who quickly master whatever I teach and wonder why we have to keep going over it.  I’m actually intrigued by the idea of using it myself. And Reif says that is one of the super powers of this approach—the teacher doing the same writing with students for 2-3 minutes. 

How about you? How do you use mentor texts? How do you entice reluctant writers, inspire bored writers, connect reading and writing, and get students to do the volume of low-stakes writing that will help them become fluent writers?