Composition & Essays

Lord of the Flies

Other Studies

Poetry

Shakespeare

To Kill A Mockingbird

Jessica Young

Unit Title: What makes something a good piece of non-fiction writing?

Grade Level: English 11

Duration: 4 weeks—10 lessons of 80 minutes in length

Rationale:

The ability to write a coherent, unified piece of writing is an essential skill whether the student plans to attend university, enter the business world, travel or pursue some other pastime after graduation. While non-fiction writing is just one style of writing, the skills and techniques employed in writing an excellent piece of non-fiction transfer to many other forms of writing including academic research papers, business letters, hypertext and creative writing. During this unit students will learn and apply several essential writing skills including formulating a thesis, identifying audience and purpose and organizing an argument.

Students will also improve their ability to read and think critically through the examination of several non-fiction essays. They will be asked to identify the use of various essay writing techniques in an assorted selection of prose. They will also be asked to critically analyze the effectiveness of these techniques in each piece. In this way, they will familiarize themselves with the basic building blocks of effective non-fiction from sentence variety to well-constructed paragraphs to properly ordered points. They will then put these techniques into practice by writing their own pieces of non-fiction, and with practice, they will hopefully become more efficient and effective writers and communicators.

While the focus of the unit is on improving writing skills, students will also be asked to improve other communication skills during various in-class activities. These activities—including small group work and class discussion—will ask students to develop their social, speaking and questioning skills. They will also participate in peer assessment of their papers, which will help them develop the valuable skills of offering tactful, constructive criticism and praise—a valuable skill in the social, business and academic worlds.