Elliott_BR_1

You Can Improve Your Students' Writing Skills Immediately! By David Melton "a revolutionary, no-nonsense, two-brain approach for teaching your students how to write better and enjoy it more" was a fun book to read. Although I found Mr. Melton's aggressive, lavishly italicized and exclamatory style a little overwhelming at times, there was a lot of information in this 96 page large-format paperback I'll be able to use.

This book is structured as a self-contained course, which I'd have to adapt to my 7^th grade language arts curriculum, so I might not be able to copy and use all ten of his conveniently presented assignment pages, but there's plenty here to pick and choose from.

I enjoyed his list of the six hurdles, or reasons that beginning writers become discouraged: they have no guarantee of readers, no deadlines, no editors, inadequate editing ability, not enough practice writing, and too little regard for their readers. His course is structured to "jump over" each of these hurdles.

Something I haven't done, that Mr. Melton highly recommends (stridently recommends) is to give a specific length for each assignment. "About two pages," I'd say. "Less than one page is probably too short, more than four is definitely too long. You should know when you've written the right amount." It's taken me a while to realize that many of them don't know, and that a specific number of words or pages will help them find out. He recommends 5% leeway more or less, and that's it.

He advocates providing at least 20 minutes of in class time for each assignment to give students the chance to get their creative brains going, which I appreciate. I also agree with his insistence that students should be dissuaded from trying to edit while they're composing their first drafts.

Two areas in which we disagree are in his disapproval of group brainstorming, which I have found invaluable n sparking ideas in students who come to an assignment insisting their minds are blank, and his enthusiasm for illustrated covers. I cringed when I read that he tells his classes he'll be reading the manuscripts with the most interesting covers first. I have students who would happily spend five hours on a cover before lifting their pencils for the first paragraph. It may be that I am jealous of their artistic abilities, but I try to provide time for their abilities to be nurtured and celebrated at other times. I want them to write when we're writing.