CURSIVE WRITING IMPROVES LEARNING

“Handwriting is a complex task which requires various skills – feeling the pen and paper, moving the writing implement, and directing movement by thought,” says Edouard Gentaz, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Geneva. “Children take several years to master this precise motor exercise: you need to hold the scripting tool firmly while moving it in such a way as to leave a different mark for each letter.”

Operating a keyboard is not the same at all: all you have to do is press the right key. It is easy enough for children to learn very fast, but above all the movement is exactly the same whatever the letter. “It’s a big change,” says Roland Jouvent, head of adult psychiatry at Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. “Handwriting is the result of a singular movement of the body, typing is not.”

Furthermore pens and keyboards use very different media. “Word-processing is a normative, standardised tool,” says Claire Bustarret, a specialist on codex manuscripts at the Maurice Halbwachs research centre in Paris. “Obviously you can change the page layout and switch fonts, but you cannot invent a form not foreseen by the software. Paper allows much greater graphic freedom: you can write on either side, keep to set margins or not, superimpose lines or distort them. There is nothing to make you follow a set pattern. It has three dimensions too, so it can be folded, cut out, stapled or glued.”

An electronic text does not leave the same mark as its handwritten counterpart either. “When you draft a text on the screen, you can change it as much as you like but there is no record of your editing,” Bustarret adds. “The software does keep track of the changes somewhere, but users cannot access them. With a pen and paper, it’s all there. Words crossed out or corrected, bits scribbled in the margin and later additions are there for good, leaving a visual and tactile record of your work and its creative stages.”

Imitation Writing to Improve Your Own Writing!

Hey, the Romantics had it all wrong: It’s imitation, not originality, that gives a writer strength. Classical students of rhetoric learned how to imitate—at first exactly, and then with creative deviations—the speeches and writings of the masters.

Practice imitating sentences by first copying a master model sentence from a published writer and then imitating the sentence style of that writer with your own sentence.

Read the selected excerpt out loud.

Copy the excerpt exactly as you see it (preferably using cursive writing). Write every word, every punctuation mark.

It may seem weird simply copying someone else’s work: Isn’t that plagiarism? However, you’ll have a much better sense of the rhetorical decisions a writer makes after forcing yourself to write down their sentences: paying careful attention to get the words, phrases, clauses, and punctuation exactly right. Then by making up your own sentences in imitation, you’ll begin to hear and sense the way master sentences trip and dance across the screen/page. Enjoy!  (Style Academy)

Texts often used by students on the AP Exam

• Beloved
• Brave New World
• Dracula
• The English Patient
• Frankenstein
• Great Expectations
• Grendel
• The Iliad
• The Importance of Being Ernest
• The Great Gatsby
• Invisible Man (by Ralph Ellison)
• Jane Eyre 
• Light in August
• Macbeth
• Othello
• The Mayor of Casterbridge
• The Metamorphosis
• Middlemarch
• No Country for Old Men
• The Odyssey
• Oedipus Rex
• Orlando
• Orynx and Crake
• The Playboy of the Western World
• A Prayer for Owen
• Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Tom Jones
• Twelfth Night
• Waiting for Godot
• Wuthering Heights

Welcome

SECONDARY SCHOOLS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The goal of Ontario secondary schools is to support high-quality learning while giving individual students the opportunity to choose programs that suit their skills and interests. The updated Ontario curriculum, in combination with a broader range of learning options outside traditional classroom instruction, will enable students to better customize their high school education and improve their prospects for success in school and in life.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LITERACY, LANGUAGE, AND THE ENGLISH CURRICULUM

Literacy is about more than reading or writing – it is about how we communicate in society. It is about social practices and relationships, about knowledge, language and culture.  Those who use literacy take it for granted – but those who cannot use it are excluded from much communication in today’s world. Indeed, it is the excluded who can best appreciate the notion of “literacy as freedom”.