“The wind howled like a pack of wolves chasing prey. Every single stalk of wheat in the field was bent over, kneeling like slaves. The wheat used to be golden and shining, but it had long since browned and become dull.
I stood there, letting the sleet cut my face like knives. Thunder boomed and lightning struck, nearly hitting the tree that stood in the middle of this field. It was completely bare, and the naked branches were sharp and twisted. From a distance, it looked like a beast from Tartarus, emerging from hell to torture humans and make people suffer.
Suddenly, another quick flash of lightning rent the sky and the tree was gone. A burst of flames took its place, showing no mercy and swallowing everything in its path whole.”
The Tree
The short writing piece above, written by my Writing Essentials student Mumu, was a response to a creative writing warm-up exercise I did in each of my classes this past semester. I call it “The Tree.” For this assignment, I asked each student to imagine a single tree in the middle of a field. Then, they had complete freedom to describe that setting in whatever way they chose. The one catch was that they had to do it from the perspective of a person feeling a strong feeling or emotion, and they could not name that emotion in their writing. After all the students finished, we read each other’s responses and tried to guess what feeling or emotion the author had chosen—Mumu chose “anger/resentment.”
At first glance, this may look like it is just an interesting creative writing exercise, which it is, but I also like it because it forces students to think critically about emotions, how those emotions present themselves, and how they affect a person’s perspective of the world. This is asking a lot though, so before asking the students to attempt this exercise, I had to first teach them how to do it effectively. To best frame how I did this preparation, I will use the author and writing educator John Warner’s R.O.A.S. process.
React. Observe. Analyze. Synthesize.
The “R’ in Warner’s process stands for “react.” After assigning this exercise and explaining the instructions, the first thing I did was show students a model response that I had written. Then, I gave them a moment to react to what they had just read before guessing what emotion the person in my model was feeling.
After that, I had the students reread and observe the model, thinking about what led them to their initial reaction. I asked them what exactly about the model made them guess the emotion they had. The key here was that they had to look at the vocabulary, the sentence construction, the imagery, and also reflect on why those things drove them to choose said emotion. Then, we discussed and analyzed those observations.
During the discussion, the students had to analyze all of those parts of the language of the model they noted. For example, in Mumu’s piece, she used a lot of strong, violent verbs like “chase“, “cut“, “strike“, “hit“, “torture“, among others. All of these verbs point toward a strong negative emotion like anger. Identifying rhetorical devices and tricks like this is not easy, so having a controlled and directed discussion about them with me is a great way to get the students on the right track.
Finally, the students had to synthesize their reasoning and explain all of the clues they observed in the model. During our discussion, they further explained to their classmates and me why all those aspects led the audience to guess a certain emotion after reading. In the end, the students synthesized all of these rhetorical devices and methods into their own writing pieces, too.
Reading Like a Writer
According to Warner, all of these skills taken together help teach students to “read like a writer,” which Warner defines as:
“Reading like a writer is less about…what a text means and is more concerned with how a text creates meaning. It’s like looking under the hood of a car and knowing how the different parts of an engine combine to deliver power to the vehicle.”
By learning how to do this, students learn and internalize how other writers achieve certain goals and guide their audiences’ thinking where they want it to go, whether it is in creative writing or in argument-based writing. This skill, understanding the audience and how to best guide their thinking, is one of the foundational skills of a good writer.
Conclusion
After we finished with the model, I set the students free to write their own responses. While planning and writing their pieces, they had to reverse engineer the process we just went through and then employ those literary methods and tricks to convey the emotion they chose. Once students learn how to use the R.O.A.S. method to better read like a writer, they can use this approach while reading novels or other students’ assignments. Then, they can add more and more writing tools to their tool belt, ultimately improving their writing and depth of thinking.
As a bonus, students regularly tell me that assignments like “The Tree” are some of their favorites.
That kind of engagement and enthusiasm combined with specifically targeted methods like R.O.A.S. can only mean good things for growing minds.