Whether you call quick writes your warmup, a focused writing prompt, writing into the day, or simply timed writing, a quick write has a range of possibilities that are just plain cool and useful in the English classroom. I adhere to the definition that Linda Reif uses in her book The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students' Thinking and Writing: “A quick write is a first draft response to a short piece of writing…” (3). Linda Reif uses other authors’ writing to spark ideas, but in my opinion, it can also be in the form of a question or another prompt to get students thinking. The three-minute quick write as a strategy is not new. It is a technique that published authors use, screenwriters, and classrooms young and old. This post is designed to help you revisit an old strategy and maybe weave in some new techniques to freshen it up a bit. If you are preparing the fall, it may be a perfect time to revisit your classroom weekly teaching routine.
The timing of three minutes is on purpose. It is just long enough to have a moment to think, but not enough time to really have a ton of delay that could cause disruptions in the classroom. I often will be able to put my response in my notebook and warn them just in time that they have a minute and a half left. The timing of this is “enough” time that it is not obtrusive to other activities in a day’s lesson plan. Think short and sweet, but just urgent enough that students will not have much time for hesitation in getting ideas down on paper.
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