Book Review by Robin Rowe:
The book "You Can Improve Your Students' Writing Immediately" is written by David Melton. Melton is an upbeat person who uses some interesting activities and lots of positive reinforcement to teach writing. He has some innovative lesson plans and some standard ones too, like the autobiography. David Melton has very firm beliefs on how writing should be taught. For example, he believes grammar skills are an important piece of good writing, but that grammar and conventions should be ignored during the rough draft copy. He also believes that the teacher should facilitate, and not always teach, good writing. Melton believes that teaching good writing often means standing back and letting the student solve their own writing dilemmas. He also provided a nice piece on editing. Another idea that Mr. Melton had was to have the students illustrate a cover for their writings.
Much as I liked the idea of students illustrating a cover for their writing, I was not overly impressed with the book. Mr. Melton is obviously a very creative person who illustrates books and has published several volumes of poetry in addition to teaching writing. My students' area of giftedness is not writing. They tend to suffer and slog through it. In general, my students do not solve their creative writing problems by themselves. Working in special education, my students need direct instruction for writing in order to connect the dots of the various writing components and even being creative must be practiced. My favorite part of the book was Melton's idea of illustrating a cover for the student's writing. I thought it might be done as part of the pre-writing exercise to see if it helps the student to write more descriptively. All in all, the book was OK. The information in the book was mainly familiar material. I rate books by deciding if I would spend my money to purchase it. In this case the answer was; "No, I would not". Perhaps this would be a good book for a teacher just starting out.
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