I’ve been making them write timed essays without outlining, trusting that an organic form will come from simply responding to the prompt and writing from there.

I modeled it for them by writing an old AP Lit exam essay about a poem, under timed conditions, in a screencast here, for what it’s worth. Interesting to be able to let them into my interior writer’s monologue as I read, annotate, and write a response, recording voiceover all the while, to the same exercise they did.

My best student responded to watching it by saying, among other things, “I didn’t think you could make a one-sentence paragraph in the body of an essay.”

One last tidbit: I took an AP Lit workshop from UCLA this summer – a waste of time, mostly – but got this from the College Board/APL celebrity who taught it: AP Lit exam graders appreciate organic form, “as long as it has a beginning, middle, and end.”

I like that: beginning, middle, end. None of this “introductory paragraph, body, conclusion” drivel.

Thanks again for the data you link to. More ammo.

And a belated welcome home, by the way.

Oddly enough, our state exam (CAPT) is designed NOT to have students write that way, but everyone assumes that that’s what the state wants. What a freakin’ mess.

That, and I’m really digging what you’ve put on these pages. It’s really thorough and thoughtful work.

I hate it.