Daily Journal Topics posted on Expository Composition Discovering Your Voice Blog

Zapping Apathy with Daily Journals

What do I like best about the daily journals used by my Creative Writing students? Probably the surprises.

Each day I write on the board: “Today’s journal topic,” followed by a prompt that comes to me or that I adapt from other sources. I tend to draw the prompts from Natalie Goldberg’s Old Friend from Far Away, Susan Shaughnessy’s Walking on Alligators, our Expository Composition: Discovering Your Voice, or from a variety of sites that I find through Googling “high school writing prompts,” “journal prompts,” “writing ideas,” or some other similar search terms.

Each journal prompt also goes on Twitter so that absent students can get the day’s prompt. A happy by-product of the tweets is that quite a few people see them, use them, and chime in with ideas. In the past, I’ve used the hashtag #journal, but that one has become sort of busy and distorted, so this semester I’m using #E307, our school’s code for the Creative Writing course. Feel free to follow along and join in!

Gary Anderson, coauthor of Expository Composition: Discovering Your Voice

Tips for Helping Struggling Writers Discussion

The following discussion question was posted recently by author Gary Anderson on the new online companion blog to EMC's Expository Composition text, Discovering Your Voice.

Tips for Helping Struggling Writers

Students struggle with writing for many reasons. Can you offer a tip for dealing with a specific obstacle that has worked for you in helping a struggling student writer?

For example, I had a student who had no conception of what sentence means. He thought that a sentence was whatever was on one line of a piece of paper. So, I tried this. As he wrote, I asked him to make his periods way-big. Ginormously huge. My thought was that if he took the time to make a really big period, he would also be using that time to consider why he was putting it there. I only had this student for one semester, and he showed some progress during that time.

If you use this strategy, please let me know how it works for you. Thanks.

To comment or read tips from other teachers, visit the Discovering Your Voice blog at www.emcschool.net/expcompDYV. The blog also offers quotes from writers on writing, videos and images, and opportunities for students and teachers to post their writing and share ideas and comments with the writing community.