Helping students put words on a page can be hard enough. "I don't have anything to write about!" they say. And when writing does happen, how do you help them develop these ideas into more effective pieces?
A powerful tool to jumpstart writing
In The Quickwrite Handbook, master teacher Linda Rief shares 100 compelling mentor texts and shows how to use each one as a powerful tool for sparking successful writing. Each mentor text includes "Try this" suggestions for inviting students to get started. You'll also find "Interludes" woven throughout: examples of quickwrites that students crafted into more fully developed pieces.
These mentor texts are curated in four categories:
- Seeing Inward How do students view themselves?
- Leaning Outward What do students consider when they step outside of themselves?
- Beyond Self What do students notice and wonder about the world at large?
- Looking Back How does reflection help students grow into more articulate, thoughtful citizens of the world?
Quickwrites go beyond writing prompts
The pages of this book champion Linda's wise words: "Quickwrites-writing to find writing-are a powerful teaching tool that help students find ideas, discover their voices, and build their confidence as they discover they have important things to say."
Quickwrites are more than a set of formulaic prompts. They are opportunities for students to use another writer's words to stimulate their thinking and-through writing themselves-to discover a voice they didn't know they had.
About the Author: Linda Rief left the classroom in June of 2019 after 40 years of teaching Language Arts with eighth graders. She misses their energy and their apathy, their curiosity and their complacency, their confidence and their insecurities. But mostly, she misses their passionate, powerful voices as writers and readers. She is an instructor in the University of New Hampshire's Summer Literacy Institute and a national and international presenter on issues of adolescent literacy. She is the author of Whispering in the Wind: A Guide to Deeper Reading and Writing Through Poetry (2022), The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students' Thinking and Writing (2018), Read Write Teach: Choice and Challenge in the Reading-Writing Workshop (2014), The Writer's-Reader's Notebook (2007), Inside the Writer's-Reader's Notebook (2007), 100 Quickwrites (Scholastic, 2003), Vision and Voice: Extending the Literacy Spectrum (1999), and Seeking Diversity: Language Arts with Adolescents (1992); she is co-editor (Beers, Probst, and Rief) of Adolescent Literacy (2007). For five years she co-edited with Maureen Barbieri Voices from the Middle, a journal for middle school teachers published by the National Council of Teachers of English. In 2021 she was honored with the Distinguished Service Award from NCTE and in 2020 received the Kent Williamson Exemplary Leader Award from the Conference on English Leadership, in recognition of outstanding leadership in the English Language Arts. A recipient of NCTE's Edwin A. Hoey Award for Outstanding Middle School Educator in ELA, her classroom was featured in the series Making Meaning in Literature produced by Maryland Public Television for Annenberg/CPB. For three years she chaired the first Early Adolescence English/Language Arts Standards Committee of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. In 1988 she was the recipient of one of two Kennedy Center Fellowships for Teachers of the Arts. She spent a month at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, writing prose and poetry based on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. She read her writing in performance at the Kennedy Center, a program later broadcast on NPR.
