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Victoria Wilding

Composition Unit: Formal Writing

Grade: English 11
Length: Twelve 77-minute lessons

Global Rationale: I designed this unit so that students can ease into essay writing, which is something many of them dread. The unit starts off with a few lessons on the meaning and purposes of formal writing, thus putting the five-paragraph essay into a practical context. One lesson also puts formal writing into a global context, as it compares Western formal writing to Eastern formal writing. Since I want to give students many opportunities to write, almost every lesson has students producing a piece of writing. None of these smaller pieces is evaluated. Rather, they are collected and marked for completion only. This way, students feel free to write, without worrying about how good their writing is. However, the final copy of their essay is evaluated holistically out of six, following the evaluation practices used for the provincial exams.