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Memoir: The Art of Writing Well, Session 13
TAILORING YOUR TEACHING
If your students feel like they’re finished revising . . . you might add new fuel to their work
by having them meet with a partner to discuss the revision decisions they’ve made. Students
might prepare for their partnership talk by rereading their drafts and marking the crafting
techniques they’ve used in their writing. When they meet with their partners, they can each
discuss the work they’ve done and name how each technique somehow improved the quality of
their writing. Then, they can lean on each other to make further revision plans. They might ask
questions such as: What work has my partner tried that I might try? Or: What have we learned
that I’ve yet to apply to my writing? You might emphasize that writers try to re-imagine their
writing and sometimes the revision work they do pays off and sometimes it doesn’t. What’s
important to remember when revising, however, is that stretching one’s way of thinking will
often lead to new discoveries.
If your students sprinkle figurative language on their writing, but it doesn’t reinforce their
ideas . . . you could teach them to identify the places where they might have used similes,
metaphors or another form of figurative language, and have them ask themselves: How does this
writing help to show my idea? It is common for students to enjoy writing with figurative
language. Once they are exposed to it through their reading or writing lives, it tends to show up
everywhere. You may find, however, that they are more focused on the language and less
focused on how this crafting technique will help develop their ideas.
If this is the case, you might teach a small group lesson or mini lesson that begins,
“Yesterday, Marlin and I were reading his memoir. There’s a scene where he’s sitting with his
mom at the vet’s office waiting to find out if his dog has survived surgery. He does such a great
job helping us understand the depths of his sadness and worry. But when the nurse comes into
the waiting room to tell him the news, he writes, ‘I jumped from my chair like a Jack-in-theBox.’ As Marlin was reading this, he said, ‘Wait! That sounds really happy, but I was actually
still really worried.’ Wasn’t that so smart for Marlin to catch that? He was using a simile, which
was a cool thing to try, but he realized that it was not at all showing his idea. So, he decided to
take it out unless he could find one that actually fit what he was trying to show.”
You might have a text that has a simile or metaphor or another form of figurative language
that seems to be taking the idea of the writing off track, and have students identify how the line
interferes with what the author is trying to say. Students might also benefit from studying an
author’s use of figurative language to identify how these crafting techniques are used to bring
meaning to the surface. This will benefit their reading comprehension as well as their writing
work.
If your students could use more support understanding how to make images hold larger
meaning in their writing…show them a published text, help them identify metaphors, and then
discuss the meaning they hold. If you’ve read Journey by Patricia MacLachlan aloud to your
class, you might choose to highlight one of the many metaphors from this text and teach
students how readers use metaphors to understand the larger meaning that an author is
communicating. Perhaps the most obvious metaphor in Journey is the image of the camera. In a
minilesson or small group, you might highlight several parts of the text where the camera
appears and show students how each part helps direct the reader towards global ideas that
Patricia wants us to understand about people and relationships.
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