In the Write!
A Blog for Writers and Writing Students
Our summer course schedule is set here at District Writers’ Academy! We hope you’ll check out our offerings, both creative and academic. COLLEGE ESSAY FOR THE WIN: We’ll be offering six sessions of our College Essay for the Win course. Designed for rising seniors who will be applying to colleges in the fall, this three-day course (two hours each day) offers students an efficient way to get the bulk of this writing task done before…
Read More
On Saturday, May 21, District Writers’ Academy is excited to participate, for the first time, in the Gaithersburg Book Festival, a long-standing and beloved tradition for lovers of books and writing in the DMV area. Founded in 2010, The Gaithersburg Book Festival has been on hiatus for the past two years due to the Covid pandemic, but it returns on Saturday with a full day of activities for writers, writer-wannabes and lovers of the written…
Read More
Helping students with their college Common App essay is one of my favorite jobs as a writing teacher. It’s a great way to learn more about my students-even those I have been working with for years, and for most students, it is a valuable place to explore and communicate (in 650 words!) some essential aspect of what makes them “them,” distinct from the facts and stats conveyed in transcripts, test scores and activity lists. And…
Read More
When I give my students a writing exercise, I often write along with them, sharing my draft as they share theirs with me. It surprises me that, after all this time, I still get nervous. Why? Because I don’t want people to see my rough drafts, I want them only to see the final, polished form. But I push through this nervousness because we ask writing students to put themselves out there all the time.…
Read More
When I first met R he was depleted. It was the first week of his sophomore year of high school, and he came to our first writing tutoring session directly from a meeting with his parents, advisor and teachers where the central topic was how to improve his lackluster academic performance, especially in his writing classes. Suffering from an abundance of comma splices and a dearth of detail, his papers had consistently gotten “C”s or…
Read More