These resources are short, timed exercises geared toward helping writers come up with topics or ideas that are worth developing. The goal with these is not final draft perfection; instead, it is to determine how invested you are in writing about a certain topic and to see how that writing comes across on the page. Each of these three exercises comes from Peter Elbow's book Writing with Power.
Freewriting
Open-Ended FreeWriting
Mapping your Ideas
Loop writing
Drafting, Revising, & Editing
Intended to provide a focus for consultation conversations, these resources identify key aspects of writing, revision, and editing for Shaker High School students. These resources may be used as writers look through completed drafts, but they may also be generative. Thinking about ideas in terms of relationships (using the Transitions resource) or about how you might combine ideas (using our Subordination resource) could help you organize your ideas as you sit down to write a first draft, too.
Transitions
Combining Sentences
SUBORDINATION
SENTENCE VARIETY
Dynamic verbs
Parallelism
Eliminating Wordiness
Avoiding Plagiarism
Introducing quotes
Descriptive Writing
Literary Analysis
From selecting relevant evidence to establishing and supporting a claim, literary analysis paragraphs and essays require high school students to go above and beyond formulaic writing. Sophisticated literary analysis requires process reading and process writing. Our writing consultants can help students use these resources in order to promote thoughtful, critical analysis and clear, concise, and well-organized writing.
Responding to Reading: Brainstorming
Body Paragraphs
Summary Vs. Analysis: Crafting a Thesis
Conclusions
Using summary to get to theme
Connecting Style to Meaning
Social Studies writing
Our social studies resources are a direct response to the most common type of writing students in social studies classes have been bringing to the Shaker Writing Center in the past few years: the Enduring Issues essay. Intended to help writers and consultants focus on the quality of the thesis and analysis, as they are the main components of the essay.
Enduring Issues Essay:
Thesis
Enduring Issues Essay:
Rubric
Enduring Issues Essay:
Analysis
Enduring Issues Essay:
Template
Science writing
Most students who bring their science writing to the Shaker Writing Center are working on labs or on science research. The focus of our resources is mostly on chemistry lab writing, but we would be grateful for any feedback about science writing resources that we could develop. The Science Action Verbs resource, along with the Eliminating Wordiness resource above, should be helpful to all writers looking to emphasize process and action and to make their writing more concise by removing wordy sentence constructions and state-of-being verbs.
Science Action Verbs
Chemistry lab introductions
Chemistry Lab Conclusions
Additional Materials
The Shaker Writing Center director and consultants are always happy to collaborate with teachers and groups of students working on projects, assignments, contests, or other writing/presentation endeavors. The Editorial resource is an example of a resource we developed in order to provide support to students working on the New York Times Editorial Contest. If you or your class are working on an assignment and would like our consultants to offer support in specific ways, please contact Mrs. Matrose.