Coaching Writing: The Power of Guided Practice

I really feel that Bill Strong has reached a point in the profession where he has integrated his first love and success - - syntactic fluency and control - - with a sense of how that all fits into what he now realizes (perhaps he did before, too) is a bigger picture. This book is sometimes overtly personal, but always to the vision of a book that celebrates teaching writing and student writers. In this book he synthesizes at least two important notions in ways rather amazing and inordinately helpful. 1. James Britton, Jim Moffett and others' ideas about a universe of discourse - - one that is not hierarchial from narrative "to" theoretical essay, but one to look at as a continuum. 2. Jerome Bruner's (and others, of course) ideas about "scaffolding." Strong built a chart that is worth much explanation.