Lessons That Change Writers

In Lessons That Change Writers, Nancie has narrowed and deepened her conversation with teachers, to focus on the minilesson as a vehicle for helping students improve their writing. She shares over a hundred of these writing lessons which are described by her students as "the best of the best." The lessons fall into the following four categories that provide the structure for this book:

• Lessons about Topics: ways to develop ideas for pieces of writing that will matter to writers and to their readers
• Lessons about Principles of Writing: ways to think and write deliberately to create literature
• Lessons about Genre: in which we observe and name the ways that good free verse poems, formatted poetry, essays, short stories, memoirs, thank-you letters, profiles, parodies, and book reviews work and
• Lessons about Conventions: what readers' eyes and minds have been trained to expect, and how marks and forms function to give writing more voice and power and to make reading predictable and easy.

Learn more about firsthand

Nancie Atwell teaches seventh-and eighth-grade writing, reading, and history at the Center for Teaching and Learning, a K-8 demonstration school she founded in Edgecomb, Maine, in 1990. Nancie was the first classroom teacher to receive the NCTE David H. Russell Award and the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize for distinguished research in the teaching of English. View Nancie's response to the New York Times article addressing the importance of student choice in reading.