We’ve been welcoming student writers to our site for years, inviting them to post thoughts to our daily prompts, analyze multimedia compositions in our live-moderated forums, and submit formal work to our many annual contests.
But there has long been a missing piece. Though we’ve provided plenty of places to practice, we’ve only occasionally published resources to help teach young people how to write.
This school year, we’re making up for that gap with a new series called Mentor Texts.
If the term is new to you, here is how the National Writing Project defines it:
Mentor texts are pieces of literature that you — both teacher and student — can return to and reread for many different purposes. They are texts to be studied and imitated … Mentor texts help students to take risks and be different writers tomorrow than they are today. It helps them to try out new strategies and formats. They should be [texts] that students can relate to and can even read independently or with some support.
And of course, a mentor text doesn’t have to be in the form of a book — a mentor text might be a poem, a newspaper article, song lyrics, comic strips, manuals, essays, almost anything.
Thanks to the 1,000-plus fresh articles published every week on NYTimes.com, we’re in no danger of running out of possible material. In fact, the hardest part of creating this series may be choosing from among too many good options.
In general, though, each edition in the series will …
Spotlight an excellent piece of writing published in The New York Times, whether on the front page or from sections like Opinion, Arts, Science, Sports, Business, Food, Travel or Style.
Try to demystify for students the effective craft moves writers make, then provide exercises that invite them to try those same moves in their own work.
Show students how the writing genres they study in school can be used in real-world contexts.
You can find the whole series in this column, beginning with several intended to support narrative writing. We’ve created these — on telling short, memorable stories; using details to show rather than tell; crafting a narrative arc; and more — to accompany the first unit of our yearlong Writing Curriculum, which will culminate in a Personal Narrative Essay Contest for students. Over the course of the school year, we’ll also be creating Mentor Text editions to support argumentative, informational and analytic writing, among other genres.
