Read as a Writer Any Time You’re Faced with a New Writing Challenge

May 1st, 2010 has come and gone, which means Ruth and I submitted our manuscript to our editor at Stenhouse!  The book now has an official title.  It’s going to be called Day by Day: Refining Writing Workshop Through 180 Days of Reflective Practice.  It will be available this October.

The weeks leading up to sending-off the manuscript were tough because we were writing parts the first and final parts of the book.  We spent time writing and rewriting the introduction and the closing thoughts.  We worked on the appendices of the book to make it as comprehensive as possible.  We wrote our dedications and the acknowledgments to the people who helped us reach the milestone of finishing our first professional book.  We both had a tough time with the acknowledgments because we had so many people to thank, but a finite amount of pages in which to thank everyone.

I felt overwhelmed every time I thought about writing the acknowledgments for our book.  Therefore, the writing teacher in me came up with a solution: READ AS MANY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AS POSSIBLE!  While I had read acknowledgments in hundreds of books, I never really gave much thought to how acknowledgments went before I had to sit down and write my part of the acknowledgments for Day by Day.  Therefore, I pulled my favorite Nicholas Sparks books down and read through all of his eloquently written ones.  When that didn’t seem like it was enough, I sifted through many professional teaching books I own in order to take cues from a variety of teacher-authors.  After reading through many acknowledgments, I figured out the following:

• There are some people Ruth and I should thank jointly.

• Acknowledgments feel more personal when they revolve around a theme or share an anecdote.

• There is often a predictable order in which to thank people (i.e., parents tend to come first, spouses near the end).

• In order to make an acknowledgment meaningful, it helps to do more than just list the person’s name.

In the end, I found myself including mentoring the beginning of my acknowledgments after Dan Feigelson’s Practical Punctuation.  I really liked the way he included an anecdote about setting goals about swimming across a lake when he was a child.  I have a similar metaphor, but mine is about climbing Mt. Washington at the age of 13.  Thanks to reading many authors’ acknowledgments, I found one (Feigelson’s) that made me realize how I wanted to move forward as a writer.

In A Guide to the Writing Workshop, Lucy Calkins states that students “need some opportunities to study closely a few texts that are similar to those they are trying to make” (2006, 11).  Just like we study texts that will help us write better, we must show our students how they, too, can read as a writer when they are faced with a new writing challenge.