The purpose of this blog is to facilitate discussion of a writing exercise whose use I’d like to try promoting in the schools. To learn more about this exercise, my thoughts on lowering the barriers to adoption, and how you can help, check out the four topics in the About section below on the right, starting with The Exercise.

The Exercise

The exercise is called “modeling”, and it comes in many variations but basically involves a student reading a piece of published writing (usually a short poem or a paragraph from a story or essay) and then writing a piece of his or her own that imitates the model’s style or structure in some way. The exercise encourages students to read and analyze a text more closely than they might ordinarily do, and then to expand their own stylistic repertoires in writing their imitations.

Fran Claggett, a former teacher of mine, played a big role in developing and popularizing the technique. You can read more about it in this chapter from her book, Teaching Writing: Craft, Art, Genre.

I first did the exercise myself as a high school student in Fran’s class, but she says that it can be used with students as early as the 4th grade. In her book, she also mentions that it can be a particularly useful exercise for students learning English as a second language.

Next: The Idea