“Think Write” is a new 6-week writing workshop designed to prepare 9th through 12th graders for the unique challenges posed by writing at the high school-level. It is often a daunting prospect, even for advanced students. Part of what makes high school writing such a frustrating endeavor is ‘information overload’. High schoolers are exposed to a variety of new writing genres and concepts while simultaneously held to unrealistic grading standards that require students to demonstrate a mastery of writing that they have rarely been taught. Worse still, as students wrestle with these challenges, they do so at a time when skill in writing influences performance on A.P.s, SATs and other standardized tests and can strengthen or weaken a college application.
The “Think Write” program does not simply mimic a high school classroom and review what students encounter there. Instead, an extremely limited class size enables “Think Write” to deploy activities that encourage students to play with language, shape it and share their insights with peers. The program is a blend of Eton-style rigor with hands-on activities and collaborative projects that are both effective and creative. “Think Write” is designed to help students discover and utilize their strengths as writers, grapple with and conquer their weaknesses and, ultimately, forge a new relationship to writing that will facilitate future academic successes.
However, there is no strong writing without strong thinking.
More broadly, “Think Write” does not just offer students the tools to articulate their ideas and opinions; it is also engineered to help students hone their analytical reasoning skills (see “Program Structure” below for more details).Thus, students are able to not simply express ideas but to form them with greater complexity. To repeat a truism, writing makes thought visible; it also encourages writers to sharpen not just their pencils but their wit.
My previous posts on literary terms have focused on two major uses of these special devices: understanding and approaching texts and, importantly, writing about them. Here we will emphasize one further purpose: locating meaning. Yes, that could mean anything! But in writing and reading literature, meaning is everything. Training your brain and eye to search for underlying meaning in what you read (and even what you experience in daily life) will teach you to be a better reader, writer, and observer of the world. How is this accomplished in texts? Read on to find out!
Of course, 25 minutes to write a full-length essay that is also meant to be descriptive, detailed, and persuasive seems a little too much like a Herculean task. They must be joking! They can’t possibly be serious about only giving us 25 minutes to write an essay for the SAT. They must really mean that we are meant to take the 25 minutes to think about an essay plan! I remember the first time I attempted the essay section, it took me the full 25 minutes to write 2 short paragraphs. Nearly every student I’ve met has felt frustration at the short time limit in the SAT writing section. However, there is hope and, similar to every other part of the SAT, the SAT essay can also be conquered with a few easy strategies.
[Continue reading to find out how you can conquer the SAT essay in under 25 minutes…]
For those of you preparing for AP English Literature exam (May 2015) this summer, read on! For those preparing for essay sections on the ACT or SAT, bookmark this blog post. While we focused on generally foundational literary terms last week (metaphor/simile, symbol, allusion, hyperbole, and irony), today’s post highlights terms you should definitely stow in your tool bag for those essay portions of college entrance exams. These big guys (diction, syntax, tone, mood, imagery, and denotation/connotation) are all top contenders for analyzing a literary passage and most importantly, writing about it clearly and effectively.
Just what are “literary terms” anyways? Although they are certainly not for the faint of heart, literary terms are not reserved for future English majors, writers, and lifetime bookworms. Think of literary terms as tools to store with all that other luggage you rely on when reading a text, writing an essay, or encountering literature. Understanding these terms will mean possessing a vocabulary that will help you approach any text at any time. Convinced yet? Good! Let’s start building that literary backbone!
What’s the difference between “affect” and “effect?” Should it be “illicit” or “elicit?” Today’s grammar boot camp session will focus on such ‘almost’ homophones, words that sound quite similar phonetically yet have very different uses. We all get these words easily confused–so pay attention! Make sure your next essay uses the proper forms of the following commonly confused terms.
Apostrophes, clauses, and phrases–oh my! Even though there are actually six types of grammatical phrases, don’t be alarmed. Getting a firm grasp on the differences between appositive, prepositional, gerund, infinitive, participial, and absolute phrases will ensure crisp, original essay writing and higher verbal scores on SAT and ACT exams. That’s right: phrases are all the rage nowadays. For good reason! Today we’ll focus on three of these phrases.
Today we return to the essential building blocks of writing: those groups of words that, when arranged in a certain way, become “phrases,” “clauses,” and “sentences.” Doubtless you have heard these terms in English class, and most likely have seen them in test-prep books for the SAT and ACT. This blog post will give you the skinny–and more–on the basics of these peculiar word groups.
This blog post is the first of a new series called “Grammar Boot Camp.” Don’t look so intimidated! My boot camps are certainly rigorous but by the end of it, you will feel primed for the writing sections on the ACT and SAT, essay assignments in English class, and AP English exams.
Let’s get started with one of the basics, those little buggers that hang out at the ends of words and sentences in a world of their own: apostrophes. Believe it or not, these guys have rules, too.
How am I ever going to finish memorizing these 1000 vocabulary words for the SAT?Is this even important for the SAT??? The SAT vocabulary used to be a large part of SAT prep. After all, if you could confidently memorize all those SAT words, you could have a perfect score on the SAT vocabulary section. Yet, nowadays, with analogies and antonyms gone from the SAT, studying for the SAT vocabulary only become directly important for the Sentence Completion part under Critical Reading. It seems that vocabulary has become less important in the SAT.
[Continue reading to find out whether studying SAT vocabulary is important…]