Real World Writing

HIGH SCHOOL WRITING EXIT PERFORMANCE STANDARD 1: Produce real world writing by using appropriate types, forms, and grammatical and mechanical conventions to communicate ideas and information to different audiences for different purposes.

Transactive, Personal Expressive, Literary, Reflective, Writing-to-demonstrate-learning (e.g., open-response answers), Writing-to-learn (e.g., notes & outlines)

• Demonstrate success in writing a wide range of forms (e.g. stories, note taking, transactive, expository, texts, poems, and plays).
• Produce writing to demonstrate learning across the curriculum.
• essays
• essay tests
• open-response answers
• Apply a variety of writing-to-learn strategies.
• note taking
• outlining
• reflective responses
• response journals
• logs
• admit/exit slips
• Develop transactive writing (e.g. writing produced for authentic purposes and audiences).
• Engages the reader by establishing a context, creating a persona, and otherwise developing reader interest.
• Develops a controlling idea that conveys a perspective on the subject.
• Creates an organizing structure appropriate to purpose, audience, and context. Uses steps to orient the reader and to clarify and justify purposes.
• Includes appropriate facts and details excluding extraneous and inappropriate information.
• Uses a range of appropriate strategies such as providing facts and details, describing or analyzing the subject, narrating a relevant anecdote, comparing and contrasting, explaining benefits or limitations, demonstrating claims or assertions, and providing a scenario to illustrate.
• Applies features of various genres (articles, speeches, brochures, manuals) in writings.
• Uses handbooks, style manuals, and models to produce correct and effective communications and to document appropriately.
• Provides a sense of closure .
• Develop personal (personal narrative, memoirs, personal essays) and literary writing (stories, poems, scripts, and plays) that:
• Engage the reader by establishing a context, creating a point of view, focus the reader on enjoyment, discussing the writer’s thoughts and feelings, and otherwise developing reader interest.

• Establish a situation, plot, point of view, setting, and conflict.
• Create an effect, such as comedy, irony, suspense, horror, or paradox.
• Create an organizing structure.
• Include sensory details and concrete, descriptive language to develop plot and character.
• Exclude extraneous details and inconsistencies.
• Develop complex characters.
• Develop ideas based on personal experience.
• Use a range of appropriate strategies, such as dialogues,
• tension or suspense, pacing, or first person point of view.
• Apply features of various genres (e. g. poems, short stories, plays) in writings.
• Produce a reflective essay that discusses:
• Goals as a writer.
• Progress in growth as a writer through the year.
• Influences on th writer’s progress and growth.
• Approaches used by the student when composing.
• Selection of portfolio pieces.
• Application of writing process.
• Use appropriate conventions of the English language including spelling, sentence structure, paragraph structure, punctuation, grammar, and usage.
• Exhibit fluency, organization, and correctness.
• Expand and refine ideas that stimulate language, expression, and form.
• Demonstrate the use of a process approach to writing across the curriculum.
• pre-writing
• drafting
• conferencing
• revising
• editing
• publishing
• Use criteria for effective writing to evaluate own and others’ writing.
• Purpose/Audience
• Idea Development/Support
• Organization
• Sentences
• Language
• Correctness

On-Demand Writing

HIGH SCHOOL WRITING EXIT PERFORMANCE STANDARD 2: Produce writing in an on-demand (90-minute) situation that narrates, persuades, or responds to a text, graphic, chart or real world experience (e.g., current event, performance, work of art) in the form of a letter, and article, an editorial and/or a speech.

Inquiry and Technology as Communication

HIGH SCHOOL WRITING EXIT PERFORMANCE STANDARD 3: Use technology to gather, organize, manipulate, and express ideas and information for a variety of authentic audiences and purposes.

• Analyze a situation based on information gathered and suggest a course of action and/or predict possible outcomes based on this data to develop writing that narrates, persuades, or responds to a text, graphics, charts or real world experience (e.g., current event, performance, work of art) in the form of a letter, an article, an editorial or speech.

• Use appropriate practices, procedures, skills, and strategies to access multiple electronic media and gather the information for specific purposes.
• research cd’s, Internet , electronic encyclopedias, e-mail, databases
• Use technology to organize and publish information for authentic audiences and purposes.
• Use electronic organizers
  • outlining, bullets, webbing (Inspiration), databases (Access)
• Determine best format for presenting information:
  • research project/document; Powerpoint, Hyperstudio, and/or other presentation software; web page; templates; embedding objects
• Incorporate technology throughout the writing process.
  • gathering information, revising and editing, presenting/publishing