Tag Archives: persuasive writing

A Kid Named A.

The fall issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine is now out, featuring excerpts from our new book, A Poem as Big as New York City; exercises and ideas for creating your own community poem project; an interview with writer Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of the newly-released Several Short Sentences About Writing; a look at Houston Writers in the Schools partnership with the Menil Collection, a local art museum; profiles of two longtime Buffalo, NY-based teaching artists; and the following essay by Oregon-based writer Michael Copperman.  We look forward to hearing your responses to the issue!

 A Kid Named A.

by Michael Copperman

A., a tall, thin kid from North Portland, A. of the backward cap and the swaggering slouch, was so confused about his thesis in class that he sat tapping his pencil and shifting in his seat all class long. He needed to identify the reason he felt speech regulations on college campuses should be banned. He wanted to say “freedom of speech” was the reason, and I asked him why freedom of speech was useful to students on college campuses, and he frowned, furrowed his brow, shrugged and then stared down at what he had written as if the words might appear on the page through sheer intensity of stare. 

After class, he lingered at the front of the classroom and asked again, “What should I say?” “What you think is right and makes sense,” I told him, and despite his persistence, I would not give him “the answer.” That attitude of “just tell me” is common among even the better students who make it to college out of our overcrowded and under-resourced public schools: they care about doing well, but have rarely been asked to figure things out themselves, let alone had their own opinions valued and evaluated on clarity and merit. We went in circles, and finally he stood with his hands at his sides in despair. (more...)

How Does a Poet Teach Persuasive Writing?

It’s not as hard as it seems.  For who is more adept at the art of persuasion than poets and revolutionaries?  When I think of who convinced me to drop my fears and limitations, my boundaries, to pick up my anger or to set it down again, to love or to know when to cut love off, to stand for life even when it meant injury, I think of the poetic revolutionaries: Alice Walker, Malcolm X, Harvey Milk, Audre Lorde, Sojourner Truth, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur.

For one of my first lessons for a persuasive writing residency at a high school, I shared SojournerTruth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech given during the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851.  A debate was raging about whether women “deserved” the right to vote.  After a male critic stated women were too physically, thus mentally, weak to vote, Sojourner stepped to the podium and spoke: “The man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or give me any best place! And aint’ I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?” (more...)