Most days in my junior high and college writing classes we begin with a quick write. I call them “Compose for 7’s” because we write for seven minutes, and our intention is to use that time to compose something that we can get into, explore, and come out of in that time frame. Students write about anything they wish, but I always offer suggestions to encourage new forms and topics, risks and discovery.
The quick writing we do is parallel to other writing and mini-lessons. It is not graded, but students do reflect on their short-term writing at the end of each quarter to consider trends and growth. Students tend to notice that writing techniques from our mini-lessons, choice reading, and open mic performances start to show up in their quick writes. For example, after a mini-lesson about different narrative leads — sensory setting, dialogue, action, character backstory — students started trying all these techniques in different parts of the stories they wrote in quick writes.
A few years ago, I wrote about how I organize our writers’ workshop with “almost free writing.” In that post, I offered a few examples of how I frame quick write prompts.
- Tell the story of the image: conversations among the people, sensory setting description, the backstory, the plot unfolding.
- Continue a story from this first line.
- Explore both sides of this question. What values, interests, and concerns of people would be for this issue? Against? What do you think?
- How does this word apply (or not) to your life?
When this school year began in August, I used similar slides to inspire a range of writing. Sometimes students use my ideas. Sometimes they combine my ideas. Sometimes they ask, “But we can write about anything we want, right?” Right. And they do. And I want them to. Here is an overview of one student’s quarter of quick writes.
The first seven minutes of class are beautiful, and most students say they look forward to this time every day.
Our first quarter has ended. Nine weeks flew by. During the final week of the quarter, I met with students to negotiate final grades (see Alfie Kohn’s, “The Case Against Grades“), and while I was chatting with one student in the corner of the room, I wanted the other twenty-five to be considering what they wanted to write about second quarter, so for the first time (and I can’t believe it took me this long to figure it out) I asked students to create the quick write inspiration slides.
First, I created a template on Google Slides.
Then, I shared the slideshow with students. We had a brief conversation about readability: font size and type, background color-font contrast, and the purpose of these slides. While I conducted conferences, students created enough quick write slides to last us until Christmas. We share them with you here and hope you find some inspiration for your own writing.
100 Quick Writes