Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively

Things I need to teach and my students need to practice to perform well on the post-test:

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 How to move beyond summarizing to offer interpretation based on evidence.

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 How to open a formal essay with a hook; the title, author, and genre (TAG) and a thesis 

statement.

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 How to present a theme statement as their thesis—in this case, including a specific point about 

how people respond to disasters and what we can learn from their example.

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 How to correct errors such as, “In ‘Sometimes the Earth is Cruel’ by Leonart Pitts is about the 

earthquake in Haiti.” Too many students wrote ungrammatical sentences like this.

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 How to vary sentences with participles and appositives.

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