How's It Going? Chp. 4 Using Mentor Texts

The concept of this chapter is extremely simple: When writing or teaching writing, one of the best ways to learn is to learn from a mentor text. When conferencing with students about their pieces, we should be hooking them up with good mentor pieces they can refer to and pointing out what aspects of writing craft they can learn from. To be ready to do that, we should have a library of "mentor texts" at our finger tips, introduce good texts to students in mini-lessons, and refer to them in conferences.

However...the concept of this chapter seems extremely difficult for me to carry out:

Here's why:

1) As a writer/writing teacher, I need to have a "knowledge base of writer's craft." (p.135)

--> Anderson recommends Zinsser's On Writing Well, Fletcher's What a Writer Needs, and Murray's Write to Learn to get started with my education in this area. Need to get one.

2) Also, I need to have a selection of mentor texts that I am familiar with enough to pull items out of to share with students.

--> Anderson's Appendix has a reasonable 50 or so book list. I know very few of these but want to have a chance to read them with a writer's eye.

3) I mainly teach "academic essays" right now and, except for one or two model essays of past students, I don't provide or refer mentor texts very much. But I feel I should. The thesis-driven, argumentative essays that my students write for practicing research documentation, argumentative rhetoric and critical thinking/reading rarely if ever exist in the real world. The only "mentor texts" I could give them are good examples of past student work and some samples written by myself and other teachers.

--> I want to work on having a variety of model essays that can illustrate "craft" in persuasive writing.
--> I also want to try to introduce writing assignments that can have models in "real" persuasive genres such as letters to the editor.