Teaching with Writelike

You can treat Writelike as daily training that yields steady gains with the occasional breakthrough.

If your class always has a lesson assigned, students can steadily work through a lesson every 1-2 weeks, or whatever cadence suits you.

People quit gym training for lack of reinforcement, but they'll stay in a sports team because there's a social game every week, and they enjoy playing with their friends.

Same with Writelike; the training is hard work, but the social performance is rewarding.

You can use response feeds, Wrotevote, Frankenstories, and/or class discussion to make writing rewarding.

Some Writelike activities are challenging, especially in detailed practice lessons where students are building complete passages and need to think through the implications of each choice they make.

Part of the reason why we recommend using Writelike as a self-directed homework activity is so that students can have time to read, think and fiddle with their work.

What do you do if you can't find a lesson that aligns with the unit you are currently teaching? 

One option is to tell us what you want and we'll see if we can make it for you.

Another option is to use Writelike for cross-genre training, since the lessons all teach transferable skills.

For example, if you're teaching persuasive writing in class, then using a narrative lesson for homework still trains students to select details, organise them into cause and effect relationships, and use text to create meaning and impact, all of which are important in persuasive writing, and take time and practice to internalise.

Writelike teaches skills that can be applied in any context, so encourage students to transfer their learning.

• Ask students to keep a notebook of techniques they are learning, expressed in their own words.
• Ask students to analyse and comment on their own writing assignments in Writelike-style terms.
• Ask students to take sample passages from your class readings and explain how they would analyse and model them. How do they think the text works? What would they highlight? How would they apply the pattern?

Writelike is about learning a way of thinking as much as it is about doing writing exercises.

Writelike focuses on sentence and paragraph-level skills.

Creating a whole text requires additional macro-level skills, such as developing and concluding a complete narrative or argument, which for now are beyond the scope of Writelike (though Frankenstories can help with this).

What you should find is that the increased fluency in sentence and paragraph level skills makes it easier for you to teach larger structures, and you will also find that you have a bank of methods that you can leverage when teaching longer texts.

For example, when you locate structural breakpoints in a text—such as the first act break in a story—you can highlight the sentences on either side of the break to analyse how the writer creates the transition, then invite students to incorporate that pattern into their own draft.