Seabury's Writers Use Mentor Texts to Hone Their Craft

Recently, a colleague told me a story about how young artists can improve their

sketches by looking closely at the thing they are being asked to draw. By asking

questions about a leaf they are trying to draw, for example, and seeking the

answers in the leaf, students' drawings grow to include the correct number of veins

and the right length from the tip to the petiole. Through revisions and consulting the

mentor text (the original leaf), the image of the leaf the child is drawing slowly

becomes a leaf recognizable to all viewers.

This growth comes through struggle, through attention to detail, through effort,

and through revision.

This week, in English class, the Seabury Middle School students have been

attending to detail in an effort to hone their writing skills. Collectively, we read

award winning feature stories written and annotated for journalism students

by Jon Franklin. Individually, students selected Pulitzer prize winning feature stories

that interested them. With both our group texts and the individual texts,

students had a clear purpose in mind for their reading: they were to read like writers.

Here are some of the tips the students discovered from analyzing the choices

the award winning journalists made:

1) Establish time, mood, place, and character early in a story--like in

the first few sentences.

2) Flashbacks can be really useful. Try not to have more than one per story.

3) When you want to move forward in time, but you have to skip ahead,

use the weather (for seasons), a comment about months or years passing,

or some other transition. Do not ignore the fact that your reader needs to

know when the story is happening. If you have to be overt, be overt.

4) Add details so your reader can imagine being there.

5) Make your reader care about your character. One way to do this is

to make the reader feel what the character is feeling.

6) Use suspense to add drama. Shorter sentences can sometimes make a

scene feel more suspenseful. So can reminders about the time or some ending

approaching.

7) Weave symbols throughout the story instead of just plonking them in.

(This might be easier done in revision).

8) The complication (the central problem for the character) and the resolution

have to match up.

9) Try not to make too many assumptions about what the reader already knows.

It is okay to give the reader some background knowledge.

10) Stick to the truth, but know how to use background knowledge to embellish

with accuracy.

Students reverse outlined the major complications and resolutions in each of their

stories and looked at the outlines Franklin provided. Students will spend more

time discovering how to shape their stories next week when they begin outlining in earnest.

The students have also selected sentences that they admire from the articles

that we read, and we will analyze those sentences more closely when we get

to the revision and/or editing steps of the writing process. We will return to the

mentor texts throughout the writing process, just like the young artists. Our goal,

though, is not to duplicate content so much as to learn about organization and style

and know what options are available for the students' own writing.

At times, inquiry is broad and expansive, and at times it is narrow. Asking what

we can learn from mentor texts is an important type of inquiry. Students know

what appeals to them in the writing; they know what seems to be working.

Asking questions about why and how improves their questioning skills, their

reading skills, and their writing skills.

When students received this assignment, I asked them what they needed to do

in order to be able to write a feature story, and reading successful examples

was one of their ideas. In this way, the students took ownership over their

own learning, and they used inquiry to improve their writing.