Advanced WritingBoost: Analyzing and Using Readings

Once students have mastered essay writing, they have the core tools they need for middle school and high school English and history classes.  However, a critical part of advanced writing involves analyzing reading materials and writing intelligently and clearly about those materials (without spending too much time summarizing them!).

To succeed in many classes (and in life!), students must learn to:

• Succinctly summarize materials.
• Read material and incorporate ideas from that material into their writing.
• Quote and paraphrase from outside resources in their own writings.
• Write essays that can analyze and critique other readings/material.
• Analyze literary and writing strategies that other writers use.
• Understand statistics and data that they might want to use in their own writings.
• Read charts and graphs to extract data.
• Create charts and graphs to use in their own writing. 

This class moves from the basics of writing one's own ideas in a compelling way, and pushes students to use other people's arguments, evidence, and data to support their own arguments. 

This is advanced writing,  critical for AP classes, the SAT and ACT essay, and for a lot of high school, college, and real-life writing.

Each day, students will work with new reading material, analyze it in a different ways, discuss the material together, and learn some new analysis tools (literary devices, data analysis methods, how to quote and paraphrase, etc.).

In the afternoons, students will work on their own analyses and response essays -- receiving individual help from the instructor, to raise their writing skills, no matter what their writing skills at the start of the class.