Mini-Lesson on Titles: The Seagull versus The Woodcock: Which Would You Read?

I was watching CBS Sunday Morning, and they had a segment on a book called Why Not Catch-21? The book discusses the origin for titles, and once I did a little research, I discovered there is weekly column in The Sunday Telegraph. The segment discussed the importance of titles. It's the first thing we notice about a paper, and it's usually the last thing that we deal with. I can't remember where I read this (Atwell? Moffett?), but the author suggested writing down 50 titles and then narrowing it down. The first twenty titles probably aren't very good. You really have to go beyond and dig deep for a great one. Occassionally, a great title might pop into our heads, but usually not.

I usually go back to my manuscript and look for key words, or I think about the main idea I want to get across to readers. Usually a great title has two parts with a colon, especially in college, right. So, the first part is the main idea and the second part after the colon goes into more detail. It's also great to insert humor or word play, if at all possible.

Let's look at some sample titles:

1. The Course of True Research Never Did Run Smoothly
2. Young Adult Literature
3. I-Search Paper

Which paper would you want to read? As teachers and readers of writing, titles will be very important. The first impression is the most important. All writing deserves a title, and hopefully a great title. We want to engage all of our readers.

In a mini-lesson, I would have student write down 30-50 titles for their paper. They will think it's impossible, but I would encourage them to just write and not worry about whether the titles were good or not. I might also lead them through how I would come up with a title. As an anticipatory set, I might share some of the stories from the book I linked to above. Does Catch-18 sound as good as Catch-22? Would either title be sufficient? You could also include in this mini-lesson information on punctuating titles. Think about how important the title was to the poem "The Kitchen Shears Speak."

Lurking on a High School Blog

I was invited from the very beginning. I will visit my friend Larry's blog (an Ozarks Writing Project Teacher Consultant), and when I visited last week, there seemed to be something different. It's because someone posted this comment to the district website:

Posted 01/12/2008

I looked at all the blogs in Alice's Restaurant. Rather than teach students to post a podcast to the web, which they will more than likely not need to do after they leave high school, I think they should have been taught better COMMUNICATION, through better writing skills. I read this was an Applied Communications class. It appeared, from their writings, the students need to learn how to communicate through writing. To be quite frank I think some elementary students can write better than this. All teachers need to start teaching better grammar to students, especially English Teachers.
To end on a more positive note, I thought the "Coach Stokes Interview" was humorous. (I will say I didn't look at the writing skills of the interview.) Ninya Biznez

Well, the part that broke my heart was that the students replied, "Yeah, we know we're not good at English." They went on to explain that they were learning and doing a lot more than they ever had before. How could he/she write that the students write like elementary students. They are seniors in high school.

Here was my reply. The students were really glad I posted. One of my favorite comments was this:

I am glad that you like what we are writing and what we are doing. It is nice to know that some people don't just look at what they see on paper, they look beyond it to see what we have really accomplished. Also i agree with what you said about the sentence-level and concern. There is much more to writing than missed spelling words and punctuations. Thanks for your kind words and encouragement.

I saw Rick Wormeli at the Write to Learn Conference. He discussed assessment as looking at the central tendency. So, you will find typos and grammatical errors on this blog, but what is the central tendency? Are students improving reading and writing? Where did they begin? Where are they know? Actually, as I write this, it makes me thing that this is the research project. What kind of writing development do students have? It would be interesting to look at a writing apprehension scale from August to May, and also to analyze their posts. Hmmmm.