Media literacy education provides a toolbox for helping direct students' attention to the way we shape information for audience and purpose. The National Association for Media Literacy Education defines the core skills of media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, and evaluate information, as well as the ability to create and act on…

Along with forty-nine other high school students, as the author recounts of their student, Meghan is part of an elective two-week academic writing workshop. Each day begins with a freewrite exercise like this one, designed to help students develop what the workshop directors call "fluency." Like Meghan, many students write prolifically…

Process and product are always in tension. In authentic writing, they can be messy and hard to assess. Because writing is recursive and generative, every word written opens new possibilities. Not only that, but writing is influenced by ability, time allowed, task definition, rhetorical situation, relationship to reading, and helpful thinking…

In this article, the author focuses on her experiences with genre analysis. This is not a new idea or assignment. But gearing the analysis specifically toward thinking about purpose significantly narrows the focus of a typical "here's what this genre is and who uses it" essay. Genre analysis asks students to think in-depth about one particular…

In teaching a research-writing unit, the author has asked her students to research and write a persuasive speech, a multigenre paper, an I-Search, a historical and comparative connection to literature, a country brochure, and a social criticism essay. While she found benefits and disadvantages in all of these assignments, the author was…

Presents five excerpts from student essays (resulting from extensive in-class coaching and computer lab time) that were based on an article from the December, 1991, issue of "English Journal." (HB)

Argues that through poetry students can give voices to people whose voices usually do not find their ways into their classrooms or textbooks. Discusses poetry and literature, poetry in history, and personalizing poetry. (RS)

Describes a method of writing about literature in which "major detail sentences" (sentences which make generalizations about the point of the paragraph) help students combine their observations and the facts of the story into an analytical form. (MM)

Discusses how powerful the letter is as a form and vehicle for writing, particularly because the language of letters is the closest to natural speech and represents casual spontaneity associated with conversation. Suggests practical ways of including letter writing in the classroom and provides sample letters as illustration. (KEH)

Describes a writing assignment in which students rewrite literary classics or fairy tales from a new perspective (i.e. making an originally minor character the protagonist, or putting the original story into a different century). (MM)

Uses six students' writing to detail classroom revision techniques that have students write alternative sections of their essays, generate new aspects of their topics, and see other possibilities in their work. (SR)

Asserts that the "Advice to Writers" project, encouraging students to articulate what they do when they write and to share those perceptions with fellow student writers, is an effective way for students to reflect on the writing process. (MM)

Describes a poetry teaching method in which prereading strategies are used to spark interest and focus on those devices students are expected to learn. Presents samples of poems students wrote imitating devices in the model. Notes that, although not all students became fans of poetry, they developed an appreciation for the poet's task. (RS)

Describes a very successful writing assignment the author uses with his high school English students, in which students write about a letter of the alphabet. Notes that this assignment grants freedom for exploration and voice, the raw material for shaping and can be used to teach everything from the writing of poetry to essays for college…

Presents a high school student's story about fishing, analyzes the story, and provides study guide questions for students intended to amplify the reading. Invites "English Journal" readers to use this story and study guide in their own classrooms. (JG)