The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students’ Thinking and Writing

Helping students put words on a page can be hard enough. ＂I don’t have anything to write about!＂ they say. And when writing does happen, how do you help them develop these ideas into more effective pieces?

A powerful tool to jumpstart writing

In The Quickwrite Handbook, master teacher Linda Rief shares 100 compelling mentor texts and shows how to use each one as a powerful tool for sparking successful writing. Each mentor text includes ＂Try this＂ suggestions for inviting students to get started. You’ll also find ＂Interludes＂ woven throughout: examples of quickwrites that students crafted into more fully developed pieces.

These mentor texts are curated in four categories:

• Seeing Inward How do students view themselves?
• Leaning Outward What do students consider when they step outside of themselves?
• Beyond Self What do students notice and wonder about the world at large?
• Looking Back How does reflection help students grow into more articulate, thoughtful citizens of the world?

Quickwrites go beyond writing prompts

The pages of this book champion Linda’s wise words: ＂Quickwrites--writing to find writing--are a powerful teaching tool that help students find ideas, discover their voices, and build their confidence as they discover they have important things to say.＂

Quickwrites are more than a set of formulaic prompts. They are opportunities for students to use another writer’s words to stimulate their thinking and--through writing themselves--to discover a voice they didn’t know they had.

Linda Rief left the classroom (reluctantly) in June of 2019 after 40 years of teaching Language Arts with eighth graders. She misses their energy, their curiosity, and their desire to read and write. She has file folders filled with the thinking of these adolescents and will continue to share all she has learned from them through writing and speaking. She is an instructor in the University of New Hampshire’s Summer Literacy Institute and a national and international presenter on issues of adolescent literacy. Her newest book is The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students’ Thinking and Writing. She is also the author or co-editor of numerous Heinemann titles, including Read Write Teach; Inside the Writer’s-Reader’s Notebook; Vision and Voice; and Seeking Diversity. She is a co-editor with Kylene Beers and Robert Probst of Adolescent Literacy. For five years she co-edited with Maureen Barbieri Voices from the Middle, a journal for middle school teachers published by the National Council of Teachers of English, and for an additional ten years continued to write a column for the journal. A recipient of NCTE’s Edwin A. Hoey Award for Outstanding Middle School Educator in the English Language Arts, her classroom was featured in the series ＂Making Meaning in Literature＂, produced by Maryland Public Television for Annenberg/CPB. For three years, she chaired the first Early Adolescence English/Language Arts Standards Committee of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. In 1988, she was the recipient of one of two Kennedy Center Fellowships for Teachers of the Arts. She spent a month at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, writing prose and poetry based on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. She read her writing in performance at the Kennedy Center, a program later broadcast on NPR. Read a New York Times article that shows how Linda and Oyster River Middle School in Durham, New Hampshire responded to increased high-stakes testing pressures. Follow Linda on Twitter @LindaMRief.