Margin Notes

This suggestion is inspired by The 1-Minute Writer: 396 Microprompts to Spark Creativity and Recharge Your Writing by Leigh Medeiros, a resource designed to offer writers four different timed prompts based on the same idea: 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and 20 minutes. In order to support a daily writing habit, writers can select the prompt that works best for the writing time they have available that day, so that they generate at least one minute’s worth of writing.

When I read the 1-Minute Writer, I loved the idea of having prompts that vary in complexity to give students the opportunity to take multiple laps around the track as they respond to a prompt, consider a topic, or grow their thinking as they see where their writing takes them. I can see this working in two ways:

• Ask students to engage with a topic (a quickwrite invitation, a writing prompt, a text to write beside, a flashdraft, etc.) in four timed sprints beginning with I minute and ending with 20 minutes. Use Natalie Golberg’s advice of keeping the pen moving in order to get any and all ideas on the page.
• Instead of revisiting the same topic for each of the four writing sprints, give students a different, more complex prompt for each round of writing. This would work very well as a variation on the one-minute paper response format. Depending on the prompts you create, students can write a separate response to prompts or they can build onto their original writing and thinking by adding more detail with each prompt. I think this would work especially well as a response to reading, viewing, or discussing with the prompts encouraging students to think more deeply, from a different perspective, or to seek out more compelling support for their thinking.