Resource Topics

Teaching Writing - Genre - Persuasive Writing

Additional Resources

One Approach to Guiding Peer Response

March 2009
Kim Jaxon
Kim Jaxon, a teacher-consultant with the Northern California Writing Project, describes a peer response strategy that, in addition to providing responders with focused guiding questions, allows them adequate time to draft thoughtful responses. More ›

Letters to the President: Students’ Voices

March 2009
To celebrate the power of student voices, the College Board's National Commission on Writing has published a selection of student writing about issues they want our new President to address, "Letters to the President: Students' Voices." More ›

Letters to the Next President: A Real-World Purpose for Student Writing

October 2008
Teachers who participated in the Letters to the Next President project, cosponsored by the NWP and Google, said that their students were motivated by having a real-world purpose for their writing, and the project engaged them in this year’s political process. More ›

The Writing Classroom as a Laboratory for Democracy: An Interview with Don Rothman

Higher Education Exchange, 2005
David Brown, coeditor of the Higher Education Exchange, interviews Don Rothman, former director of the Central California Writing Project, who for more than 30 years taught writing "as if the world depended on it." More ›

Inclusion and the Multiple Intelligences: Creating a Student-Centered Curriculum

The Quarterly, 2003
Jennifer Borek
Echoing Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligences, Borek identifies learning similarities in her students and describes ways she uses knowledge of those similarities in her classroom. More ›

Beyond Rhetoric: A Reflective, Persuasive Final Exam for the Workshop Classroom

The Quarterly, Fall 2001
Sarah Lorenz
Lorenz's final exam tests students on their dexterity with persuasive writing by requiring them to write convincingly about the concepts, skills, and attitudes they have acquired in her writing class. More ›

Getting Real: Authenticity in Writing Prompts

The Quarterly, Summer 1997
Patricia Slagle
Teachers often strive to develop exercises in which students write "authentic" pieces for an audience beyond the teacher. Here Slagle demonstrates the next step: sending student writing to people outside the classroom. More ›

OP 14. Shirley and the Battle of Agincourt: Why It Is So Hard for Students to Write Persuasive Researched Analyses

National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy Occasional Paper, 1989
Margaret Kantz
Kantz connects recent research on expository writing with a discussion of common student problems in writing a term paper. More ›

Watch Letters to the Next President in the Classroom

November 2008
Students used new Internet tools to publish their opinions about the economy, gas prices, health care, and education on Writing Our Future: Letters to the Next President, an online project sponsored jointly by the NWP and Google. More ›