Here are 10 key take-aways:
1. First, before anything about the content of his presentation, I want to comment on the form: Mark began with a story about an important student in his life. He began by saying, "Let me start with a story before we get into all of this [gesturing at the Google Slides]." But of course the story ended with a punchline that was important for the presentation (about "opening doors" for students). It was example #2353 in my experience of the importance of story. By the end of the story, the audience was riveted.
OK, now to the content of Mark said...
2. "Too often we 'assign' writing without actually teaching it. I believe the teaching of writing needs to be explicit. And teaching writing should be about more than just dictating formulaic structures and assuming that things like style and voice will eventually (and naturally) follow once the students have written an infinite amount of formulaic essays." This began his presentation. The "Writing Backwards" of the title referred to his idea of teaching style and voice first. "By starting with style and voice," he writes, "students will quickly become engaged and empowered." He then walked the audience through 15 mini-lesson that he uses with his students to develop voice. All of these mini-lessons were playful and humorous. It's easy to see how these 10-minute lessons would be engaging and would build students' interest in playing with language.
Here are a handful of my favorites:
3. Daily Dynamic Language. Create a static sentence that contains abstract nouns and weak verbs (e.g. She is so full of anger.). Elicit student suggestions to improve the sentence by incorporating concrete nouns, active verbs, imagery, comparisons, rhythmic repetitions, and other poetry/rhetorical devices. (One thing I like about this is that it makes revision of "okay" sentences into creative, artful, interesting sentences a daily activity. The title is reminiscent of "Daily Oral Language" which is a daily "fix the grammar" exercise. This is a "make it more interesting" exercise, using a variety of rhetorical tricks.) (Mark's example: "Stephanie stormed into the room and slammed the door so hard that the hinges rattled.")
4. Show, Don't Tell. Create sentences that tell the reader something (It is hot, She was sick). Ask students to rewrite the sentence in a way that will show the reader something by incorporating sensory details. Discuss why showing is more compelling.
5. Metaphorical Mix and Match. Makes a list of abstract nouns and a list of concrete nouns on the board. Ask students to match one concrete noun to one abstract noun and expand the metaphor to show how it makes sense. (Love/Boulder) Discuss how the randomness of the connections create style and voice.
6. Words with Attitude (tone exercise). Tell students to write a description of their day in a specific, emotional tone (e.g. angry, frustrated, gleeful, giddy, sad, bored). Identify diction that conveys the anger. This invites students to become aware of how word choice impacts tone. Mark's example: attitude: boredom; Sentence that reveals attitude: "Monday trudged along like a lumbering freight car wheezing out of the windswept train yard."
7. Vivifying Verbs. Give students a list of verbs: some limp and passive, some vivid and active. Ask students to circle the vivid verbs in the list. Discuss why they are vivid; what they SHOW. Then, ask students to select at least three vivid verbs and write a sentence using all three of those verbs. (It strikes me that you could do this along with words from your current vocabulary lists.
8. Musical Anaphora. Show the students an example of anaphora. Then have them experiment with the device by writing three sentences about a personal or political desire. It seems like this is a good opportunity to talk about mixing concrete and abstract nouns (sunlit path/ racial justice) and antithesis.
Model: Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to life our nation from the quick sands of injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mark's Model: When the world is seething with division, I will seek union. When the world is seething with cruelty, I will seek kindness. When the work is seething with paralysis, I will seek action. When the world is writhing under the weight of its own darkness, I will beckon the light.
9. Forceful Fragments. Fragments can create emphasis, transition, or closure. Why not teach students how to use them effectively, rather than write "frag." in the margin? Model a passage that includes effective fragments, then ask students to write a short paragraph about a problem they have encountered recently that includes three transitions -- one towards the beginning, one in the middle, one at the end.
10. Sultry Syntax. This is the big one. Invite students to experiment with each syntactical form about any topic they are familiar with (school, sports, family, work). Discuss how the sentence structure impacts meaning. Then ask students to include these in an essay. Mark lists: cumulative, periodic, polysyndeton, asyndeton, general parallel structure (parallel lists). It'd be easy to add a couple others, like tricolon, balanced pairs, uses of a colon.
11. Silly Satire. Come up with a thesis on which almost everyone can agree. (Smoking is bad for your health). Then write a paragraph claiming the opposite. Make is so ridiculous that that it becomes obvious they really don't mean what they're saying.
Two other topics of the presentation were memorable. Rubrics, he confessed, confused him. He was much more comfortable using checklists when reading and grading papers. He asked students to practice specific techniques in class, then asked them to annotate them in their "formal writing." It makes sense that, in an atmosphere where students are learning and playing with words, that a reasonable expectation is that they're trying out some moves (including, having a topic sentence or a following every example with an explanation or using an anaphora). Often, I think, teachers expect both things at once -- for kids to incorporate a multitude of expectations AND the paper is graded (like an egg is graded) on a variety of rubric columns.
Lastly, Mark suggested that if your examples have a little bit of humor and you ask students to have fun with this, students learn quickly, and papers (some 140 that he says he grades each week!) were far more enjoyable to read.
This presentation inspired me to put some of the style lessons that I've used in class together as a group of minilessons to share. Recently, I took a sentence written by NY Times writer Farhad Manjoo as a model, talked about it with class, then provided a "Madlib" version of the same sentence for students to create their own sentence with. Here's a link to the article. Real world sentences often do more than just a single technique at once. Here's the sentences I used as a model:
When Joe Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas, greeted Jack Dorsey at a congressional hearing last week, he sounded flummoxed.
“I don’t know what a Twitter C.E.O. should look like,” Mr. Barton said. “But you don’t look like what a C.E.O. of Twitter should look like.”
You can reach Mark Maxwell -- perhaps to do a similar talk at your school? -- at mark.maxell@d124.orgThe congressman had a point. Mr. Dorsey — who sported a nose ring, a popped-collar shirt and a craggy Moses beard — looked more like a hipster version of a Civil War officer than a tech icon. Yet more striking than his look was his manner before skeptical lawmakers.
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