Review of TEACH LIKE A WRITER, JENNIFER WEBB
This article is part of a series in which I publish reviews that appeared some years ago. If you're anything like me, I sometimes forget about the existence of some titles, so a reminder like this can be quite useful I think.
This book was written for teachers, but I suspect it may be interesting even for people who write but don't teach.
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Teach Like a Writer (Jennifer Webb, John Catt, £15)
The underlying premise of this book is very good, and can be summed up in the following sentence:
“Writing a newspaper article in 30 minutes, on a completely alien topic with no preparation, research or moral imperative is... ridiculous. ”
In other words, the typical school writing assignment involves working in a way that no real writer does. This book aims to change that by providing insights into the writing process across several, very different genres - fiction, journalism, politics, poetry, academia and theatre. As well as an excellent series of diagrams, templates and guides (some downloadable from a supporting website), there's a panoply of resources and an implicit insistence on high standards.
The emphasis throughout is on the experience of writing from the perspective of various professionals, which could have resulted in something far removed from the classroom, but the activities included render the book extremely relevant for teaching purposes.
Reviewed by Terry Freedman for Teach Secondary magazine.
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