Reading Like Writers: The Folger Method and Student Writing

This free interactive virtual session uses Folger Method Essential Practices to reshape how teachers approach the blank page: the same practices that make Shakespeare’s language accessible to every student are also, at their core, writing instruction. Rather than treating close reading and composition as separate units, participants will explore how the interpretive choices students make out loud about emphasis, rhythm, and what to cut, are the very choices strong writers make on the page. 

In this session, you’ll experience, and leave ready to use, three adaptable practices that carry directly into strengthening student writing: 

Hear how emphasis makes meaning. Participants will use Tone and Stress, a low-stakes entry, high-stakes discovery practice in which shifting inflection and emphasis changes what a line means, working from a sampler of Shakespeare’s language. We will explore how the same attention students bring to a single stressed word sharpens their own prose, teaching them that emphasis, word choice, and syntax are decisions a writer makes on purpose. 

Get language, and its rhythms, into every mouth. Participants will experience Tossing Words and Lines, a collective practice in which fragments of language move around the room from voice to voice, drawn here from a mix of nonfiction and fiction. We will discuss how hearing sentences aloud across genres tunes students’ ears to rhythm, cadence, and variety, the qualities that carry over directly into the sentences they write. 

Cut to discover what revision really is. Participants will take up Cutting the Text, negotiating line by line what to keep and what to lose, first in a piece of Shakespeare and then in a piece of their own original writing. We will consider how cutting reframes revision as an act of interpretation and choice, giving students a concrete, transferable way to strengthen their own drafts.