How they were written

A technique I really appreciate and would like to use someday is one brought up in Katie Wood Ray's inquiry study, Exploring Inquiry as a Teaching Stance in the Writing Workshop. A teacher in her study, Emily, presents op-ed articles to her fifth graders, who figure out how they were written, and then emulate the writing in their own op-ed piece. This process seemed familiar, and I recognized it as how we determined in our Adolescent Literacy class how to write a report on our case studies.

When I was in high school, I remember my sophomore English teacher posing the question for our journal warm-ups: "Why do we read literature?" Even though English classes had always been my favorite, I wasn't really sure. I ended up answering that the purpose was to see how great authors wrote and try to improve on our own writing through their techniques. My opinions have of course changed on why we read literature, but I'm a little disappointed in past-me for reducing literature to simply learning writing techniques.

That being said, I definitely think there is strong value in looking to literature and especially non-fiction works for answers to the question, "How do I structure what I want to say in the most effective way possible?" Ideally, as teachers we could send our students through and beyond high school with a toolbox of methods for writing what they want to say most effectively, but even better if we could send them out with the methods for deciphering what formats and techniques they can glean from any piece of writing.