Scholastic’s six-step workshop makes writing persuasive essays much less intimidating to students.

Scholastic’s “Write It: Essay,” for older students, incorporates interactive tutorials, exercises, publishing opportunities, message boards, and creative ideas – all meant to help students sharpen their persuasive essay-writing skills.

• Brainstorm: These tips help students find and examine a topic they feel passionately about by seeking inspiration from art, their lives, or what’s around.
• Draft: These strategies help students conduct research, organize their thoughts in an outline, and start writing.
• Review: Students learn to evaluate and improve their own work, as well as get – and give – meaningful feedback.
• Revise: Students “re-vision” their drafts, learn how to handle feedback from others, and follow a 12-point exercise to help them approach their writing from new perspectives.
• Polish: These strategies help students learn to proofread like a pro, avoid grammar and spelling mistakes, and make sure they correctly document credit where it’s due.
• Publish: A unique opportunity for students to become published writers! Here, they submit their completed work to Scholastic.com.'

Plus:

• Students can Chat with Fellow Writers to get feedback on their writing.
• Students can read a published essay about stress by Brian, 15.

Learning Objectives

Derived from Scholastic's "Teacher Center: Essay"

• Students will use the following writing techniques in their essays:
  • Excellent language and mechanics.
  • Effective, subtle, and/or innovative organization
  • Word choice is deliberate and works with the content.
  • Sentence structure is varied.
  • Language and rhythm are consistent throughout the piece.
  • The ideas within and behind the work are well developed
  • Details are chosen carefully and are not superfluous. Piece is full of “spikes”
  • to grab and hold the reader’s attention.

• Each students will also use their unique experiences, ideas, and perspective to demonstrate originality:
  • The idea is original and handled
  • deftly in a genre and style suited to the
  • subject matter.

• Each students will discover, develop, and express personal voice through writing.
  • Phrasing and language are memorable
  • The tone or voice is original, and the student
  • seems confident in her or his own voice/style.
  • Student manipulates all of the mechanics of good writing to convey feeling and meaning throughout the piece.

Related Resources

Write It

The premiere site for kids' and teens' writing instruction and online publishing, Write It is packed with step-by-step workshops, tutorials, and activities to help motivate students to become great writers.

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