Writing on Demand: Best Practices and Strategies for Success

With today's emphasis on state assessment and writing across the curriculum, this book offers excellent advice to prepare students for writing assessments. It is written especially for teachers of high school students. Because high-stakes tests are here to stay for the foreseeable future, it is the teacher's responsibility to assure that students are taught to write on demand. The book offers approaches that simultaneously help develop student writing abilities and prepare students to write successfully on demand. The authors assume that good writing and writing on demand are not contradictory, that assessment is an integral part of effective writing instruction, that writing prompts can be approached rhetorically, that careful reading fosters good writing, and that criteria for evaluation belong in the classroom. Useful Topics for teaching writing: Thinking Backward - pp. 9-30 Students should read and discuss in general terms a range of models; assess in specific terms the qualities of those models; and speculate on the impetus for each model and what it is trying to accomplish. Qualities that are routinely assessed in rubrics are discussed on p. 27. The most important point students need to know is that the writer's adult audience is a definite constant. The authors make clear that adult assessors judge students' abilities on state writing tests. The ability to read a prompt and use it effectively is crucial. The authors also address the challenge of time, helping students quickly make notes on a prompt, pre-write, and know where they are going. Process of Writing: pp. 31 - 60. Most helpful strategies: Ways to Get into Your Writing. Brainstorming - take a minute or two to jot down everything they know about the subject. Listing - for more narrow topics and put in categories. Listing and Forced Choice - more directed and focuses on one aspect of an assignment. Webbing or clustering. Visualizing - doodle and draw. Free-writing - brief (three- to five- minute). Looping - write in short, timed segments, look for a phrase or word or whole sentence that seems the most important and continuing to write for three to five minutes. Five W's. Cubing. Using Writer's Notebook. Good mini-lesson on Peer Response Writing Groups on p. 55. Conference with students on p. 58. The Rhetoric of Prompts and Assignments - pp.62- 88. The Five Prompt Analysis Questions - p. 67. Also gives examples of expository, persuasive, and narrative prompts. There is a good example of using visual images as a narrative prompt on pp. 81-84.

The importance of timed writing tests such as the SAT, the AP exam, and state tests seriously challenge writing teachers' best practices, which have emphasized the writing process. As a high school teacher, I found this book extremely helpful in readying my students (and myself!) for this challenge. Although many of the teaching practices suggested in this book are not new, they are reconsidered in ways which will prepare students for timed exams by using an abbreviated process approach. The focus on rhetoric provides students with a systematic tool for analyzing their own writing and other writers' texts. The minilessons are particularly helpful, and I plan to incorporate them into both my AP class and my ninth grade class.