The Driver’s Ed of Essay Writing: Brave Writer’s Essay Prep Classes
Would you toss the car keys to your teen who has never driven before? I hope not! Driving requires familiarity with a car and the rules of the road.
Likewise, essay writing depends on familiarity with essays and the characteristics of good expository writing. Yet most high school students have never read an essay before being asked to write one!
Our Essay Prep series (for ages 13 – 18) is the driver’s ed of essay writing.
Let Brave Writer introduce your teen to the essay form: reading essays, examining them, playing with essay skills and tools BEFORE careening down the highway of academic discourse.
Classes can be taken in any order:
Reading the Essay provides a roadmap to essay writing. This class gives students a chance to see what essays are like—before they have to write one! We share some of our favorite essays in this class and discuss the elements that make them successful. Students interact with the texts and with each other!
Students will:
- find the “angle of vision” in the essays they read
- write about a topic from different points of view
- give a surprising view or debunk commonly held beliefs
- reflect on personal experiences in writing
- use writing voice to strengthen an argument
- discover bias or slant in persuasive writing
- develop reasoned arguments that form the foundation of persuasive essays
Dynamic Thinking class is our unique, revolutionary class that grows your teens into critical thinkers. Great essays are built from great insight. To generate that insight, teens need to consider multiple points of view simultaneously and dispassionately. Deep thinking, right? This class takes your teen beyond snap judgments and puts gas in their tank for writing.
Students will:
- learn to think about the controversial nature of a topic for writing
- powerfully associate ideas using metaphor and analogy
- identify their true perspective about a topic to aid thesis development
- believe and doubt the same argument, to grow their minds
- create a collage of writing (a final project synthesizing writing from the class)
ESSAY PREP: RESEARCH & CITATION
Research & Citation: Once upon a time, students got their information from books at the library, not the Internet. One thing’s for sure, the academic terrain has shifted from when we were in school. This class teaches your kids how to find reliable, essay-worthy information on the Internet. We also tackle the nitty-gritty when it comes to current expectations on how to format an essay and cite sources(so teens can avoid inadvertently plagiarizing!).
Students engage in the following activities:
- keenly observing and examining an idea
- using inquiry as the basis for writing
- researching with search engines and local library databases
- evaluating the credibility of a source
- taking efficient notes
- summarizing, quoting, and paraphrasing
- planning and writing a research project
- citing sources using MLA format
These three classes comprise the ‘driver’s manual’ to prepare your teens for the solo drive of essay-writing.
Buckle up, because Brave Writer has all three essay prep classes available this spring!
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