Ch. 14: Taking Care of Business

In this chapter, Nancie Atwell introduced nonfiction writing such as protest letters, letters of complaint, petitions, profiles, resumes, etc. This is a neat writing activity for students! I recall doing this only very few times since I’ve been in school, including college. That is very unfortunate because students are so consumed in completing literature tasks when writing for a purpose beyond the classroom produces greater results (develop “street smarts,” knowledge about real-world issues). While learning about Shakespeare is beautiful haha, students need to be more exposed to real-world writing since the majority of students are not going to college to become teachers of Shakespeare. J I absolutely love how Nancie Atwell encourages this activity, and it took me by surprise when she said that “Writing about ideas may well be the hardest genre to sponsor in school.” Now I understand why I find the Linguistics paper I’m going to write is very hard to begin in spite of my huge excitement about it. My paper is somewhat a campaign letter which I intend to address to the state eventually. I am advocating for the Deaf students who continually suffer in grade school, being retained yearly because they are unable to pass the LEAP. Their so-called inability to pass those standards is because English is not their native language; therefore they don’t speak or write it “good enough.” So…this chapter and my campaign letter = perfect timing!
As I’ve already said, I admire how Atwell encourages student involvement in writing activities that builds students’ knowledge and credibility in the real world. There is one thing that I’m confused about; Atwell says, “We never find five paragraphs- the essay form still taught in many schools –and we seldom find topic sentences, thesis statements…” So I wonder, WHY do we teach the five paragraph essay form so often, and not others? Better yet, WHY do we keep encouraging writing tasks that only require the five paragraph essay form? It gets BORING! Our students deserve more than that.