Writing is Dialogue

Seminars

Writing Backwards: Using Induction in Composition

Do your students get stuck generating a thesis? Do they sit for an hour in front of the computer before producing a sentence? Do they struggle structuring anything that doesn't look like a five-paragraph assignment? That’s because they write backwards instead of following an idea inductively, gathering specifics and moving to the paper’s focus. This workshop explains how students can write essays, poems, reflection pieces, and respond to prompts using a single method that will end spotty organization, caffeine-fueled, late-night writing, and hours of staring at a blank computer screen. Explaining how students can determine a paper’s focus after first gathering specific information, we’ll explore what to gather (descriptive details, quotes, anecdotes, and facts), how to gather them (through brainstorming, interviews, direct observation, and third-person research), and ways to structure their material (from chronologic to dialectic, cause-effect, spatial, associational, by contrast, on a continuum, and more). Once they understand the three parts of writing (focus, categories, and specifics), students can inductively gather and structure material for any kind of composition.

$1000, Full day

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: Varied Approaches to Analysis

A reader’s engagement with a text depends on his ability to understand how it is constructed. Aiming to provide students with a multiplicity of reading tools, we teach them analysis, but we focus primarily on textual analysis. This workshop explains how to teach analysis as a critical thinking skill and then itemizes four additional approaches beyond the textual: sociological, mythological, psychological, and deconstructive. These additional approaches are familiar to our students, who learned them as kinds of conflict: character versus self (psychological), character versus society (sociological), and character versus god/fate (mythological). Finally, deconstructive analysis teaches students how to understand intent as well as meaning, isolating the techniques authors use to create their texts. Drawing from literature, mass media and pop culture, this session will explain how students can approach a single text from a variety of angles.

$500, Half day

Myth-ing in Action: Using Mythology to Explore Literary Themes

From Homer the blind poet to Homer Simpson the dysfunctional father, all stories are grounded in the archetypes of heroes and journeys. Tricksters, fools, sages, innocents, and warriors all move through initiation to resolution, their tales both literary and psychological guides for their cultures. As Carl Jung noted, mythologizing is a process, a way of drawing on universal symbols to make sense of our world and our place within it. Drawing from literature, film, music, and advertising, we will explore how, as Eudora Welty said, “all literature begins with the journey,” and how the failure of the modern hero is a seismic shift in literature. We will discuss the wedding of mythology and psychology, exploring various incarnations of the hero, including the trickster, the warrior, the scapegoat, the sage, and the innocent.

$500, Half day

Scoping Out Your Curriculum: Creating a Vertical Teams Program

Students and teachers benefit from a sequenced, skills-based program, providing consistent expectations from grade level to grade level. In this seminar we explore how to construct a graduation-oriented scope and sequence program, a progressive development of skills that are introduced, reinforced, and then mastered at particular points in a school's curriculum. A scope and sequence program provides common terminology, avoids overlap, irons out inconsistencies, and emphasizes the development--not mere repetition--of skills and methodologies. The seminar focuses on establishing a comprehensive writing program, offering students instruction in composition styles and formats from the personal to the informative to the critical.

$1000, Full day

Upcoming