Mentor Texts Exemplars from Writing:
These can be used for multiple purposes and for reasons. Teachers may want to have students emulate the writing style of these authors or they may want to use some of them as writing prompts and starters. Teachers have the flexibility to utilize these in the way they see fit. MODELING HOW TO USE MENTOR TEXTS IS THE KEY.
Description that Creates Suspense
Author unknown
At 7:59 this Thursday night, a think hush settles like a cigarette smoke inside the sweat scented TV room of Harris hall. First to arrive, freshman Lee Ann squashes down on the catbird seat in front of the screen Soon she is flanked by roommates Lisa and Kate, silent, their mouths straight lines, their upturned faces lit by the nervous flicker of a car ad. To the left and right of the couch, Pet and Anes crouch on the floor, leaning forward like runners awaiting a starting gun. Behind them, stiff standees line up at attention. Farther back still, English majors and jocks compete for an unobstructed view. Fresh from class, shirttail flapping, arm crooking a bundle of books, Dave barges into the room demanding, “Has it started? Has it started yet? He is shushed. Somebody shushes a popped open can of Dr. Pepper whose fizz is distractingly loud. What do these students so intently look forward to? At last it starts- TV’s hottest reality show.
Description through Narrative
by Anneie Dillard Teaching a Stone to Talk
He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard’s; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin; maybe two brown hairs’ worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn’t see any more than you see a window.
Description of Character
Rick by Brade Benioff
Rick was not a friendly looking man. He wore only swim trunks, and his short powerful legs rose up to meet a bulging torso. His big belly was solid. His shoulders, as if to offset his front-heaviness, were thrown back, creating a deep crease of excess muscle from his sides around the small of his back, a crease like a huge frown. His arms were crossed, two medieval maces placed carefully on their racks, ready to be swung at any moment. His round cheeks and chin were darkened by traces of black whiskers. His hair was sparse. Huge, black, mirrored sunglasses replaced his eyes. Below his prominent nose was a thin sinister mustache. If couldn’t believe this menacing-looking man was the legendary jovial Rick.
Dialogue through Narrative (actual dialogue and summarized dialogue)
Gary Soto Living up the street
“Are you tired?” she asked.
“No, but I got a sliver from the frame,” I told her. I showed her the web of skin between my thumb and index finger. She wrinkled her forehead but said it was nothing.
“How many trays did you do?”
I looked straight ahead, not answering at first. I recounted in my mind the whole morning of bend, cut, pour again and again. Before answering in my mind the “thirty-seven.” No elaboration, no detail. Without looking at me she told me how she had done fieldwork in Texas and Michigan as a child. But I had a difficult time listening to her stories. I played with my grape knife, stabbing it into the ground, but stopped when Mother reminded me I better not lose it. I left the knife sticking up like a small leafless plant. She then talked about school, the junior high I would be going to that fall, and then about Rick and Debra, how sorry they would be they hadn’t come to pick grapes because they’d have no new clothes for the school year.
Describing through Sight
Amy Tan Fish Cheeks
On Christmas Eve I saw that my mother had outdone herself in creating a strange menu. She was pulling black veins out of the backs of fleshy prawns. The kitchen was littered with appalling mounds of raw food. A slimy cod with bulging eyes that pleaded not to be thrown into a pan of hot oil. Tofu, which looked like stacked wedges of rubbery sponges. A bowl soaking dried fungus back to life. A plate of squid, their backs crisscrossed with knife markings so they resembled bicycle tires.
Tracy Kidder Among School Children
She was thirty-four. She wore a white skirt and yellow sweater and a thin gold necklace, which she held in her fingers as if holding her own reins, while waiting for children to answer. Her hair was black with a hint of Irish red. It was cut short to the tops of her ears, and swept back like a pair of folded wings. She had a delicate cleft chin and was short-the children’s chairs would have fit her.... Her hands kept very busy. Thy sliced the air and made karate chops to mark off boundaries. The extended straight out like a traffic cop’s, halting illegal maneuvers yet to be perpetrated. When they rested momentarily on her hips, her hands looked as if they were in holsters.
Describing through Hearing
Ian Frazier Canal Street
The traffic on Canal Street never stops. It is high energy current jumping constantly between the poles of Brooklyn and New Jersey. It hates to have its flow pinched in the destiny of Manhattan, hates to stop at intersections. Along Canal Street, it moans and screams. Worn brake shoes of semi trucks go “Ohhhhhhhhhnnnnnooooooooh” at stoplights, and the sound echoes in the canyons of warehouses and Chinatown tenements. People lean o their horns from one end of Canal Street to the other. They’ll honk nonstop for ten minutes at a time, until the horns get tired and out of breath. They’ll try different combinations: shave and a haircut, long-long-long, short, short short, long. Some people have musical car horns of four tunes.
Descriptive Writing for Setting
John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan Mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees— willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter’s flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of ‘coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.
Use of Dialect in Narrative Writing
Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God
“Ah ain’t never seen my papa. And Ah didn’t know ‘im if Ah did. Mah mamma neither. She was gone from round dere long before Ah wuz big enough tuh know. Mah grandma raised me. Mah grandma and de white folks she worked wid. She had a house out in de backyard and dat’s where Ah wuz born. They was quality white folks up dere in West Florida. Named Washburn. She had four gran’chillun on de place and all of us played together and dat’s how come Ah never called mah grandma nothin’ but Nanny, ‘cause dat’s what everybody on de place called her. Nanny used to ketch us in our devilment and lick every youngun on de place and Mis’ Washburn did de same. Ah reckon dey never hit us uh lick amiss ‘cause dem three boys and us two girls wuz pretty aggravatin’, Ah speck.
Paragraphs from Memoirs
Nathan McCall
Makes me Wanna Holla
The fellas and I were hanging our on our corner one afternoon when the strangest thing happened. A white boy, who appeared to be about eighteen or nineteen years old, came pedaling a bicycle casually through the neighborhood. I don’t know if he was lost or just confused, but he was definitely in the wrong place to be doing the tourist bit. Somebody spotted him and pointed him out to the rest of us. “Look!” What’s that mother**** doin ridin’ through here! Is he craaaaaazzy?!
Author Unknown
Go Ask Alice
Yesterday I remember thinking I was the happiest person in the whole galaxy, in all God’s creation. Could that only have been yesterday or was it endless light years ago? I was thinking the grass had never smelled grassier, the sky had never seemed so high. Now it’s all smashed down upon my head and I wish I could just melt into the blaaa-ness of the universe and cease to exist. Oh why, why, why can’t I? How can I face Sharon and Debbie and the rest of the kids? How can I? By now the word has gotten around the whole school, I know it has.
Piri Thomas
Down These Mean Streets
Yee-ah!! Wanna know how many times I’ve stood on the rooftop and yelled out to anybody; “Hey, World-here I am. Hallo, World- this is Piri. That’s me. “I wanna tell ya I’m here, and I want recognition, whatever that mudder***** means.” Man how many times have I stood on that rooftop of my broken down building at night and watched the bulb-lit world below.
Like somehow it’s different at night, this is my Harlem. There ain’t no bright sunlight to reveal the stark naked truth of garbage littered streets. Gone is the drabness and hurt, covered by a friendly night. It makes clean the dirty-faced kids.
Alex Kotlowitz
There are No Chidren Here
Nine year 0ld Pharoah Rivers, stumbled to his knees. “Give me your hand,” ordered his older brother, Lafeyette, who was almost twelve. “Give me your hand.” Pharoah reached upward and grabbed slippery, narrow trail of dirt and brush.
“C’mon, man.” Lafeyette urged, as his stick thin body whirled around with a sense of urgency. “Let’s go.” He paused to watch Pharoah struggle through a thicket of vines. “Man you slow.” He had little patience for the smaller boy’s clumsiness. Their friends had already reached the top of the railroad pass.
Dave Peltzer
The Lost Boy
Winter 1970, Daly City, California I’m hungry and I’m shivering in the dark. I sit on top of my hands at the bottom of the stairs in the garage. My head is tilted backward. My hands became numb hours ago. My neck and shoulder muscles begin to throb. But that’s nothing new-I’ve learned to turn off the pain.
I’m mother’s prisoner.
I am nine years old, and I’ve been living like this for years. Every day it’s the same thing. I wake up from sleeping on an old army cot in the garage, perform chores, and if I’m lucky, eat leftover breakfast cereal from my brothers. I run to school, steal food, return t “The House” and am forced to throw up in the toilet bowl to prove that I didn’t commit the crime of stealing any food.
John Niedhart
Black Elk Speaks
My Friend, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow? So many other men have lived and shall live that story, to be grass upon the hills.
In the story of all life that is holy and is good to tell, and of us two-leggeds sharing it with the four-leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things; for these are children of one mother and their father is on Spirit.
This then, is not the tale of a great hunter or of a great warrior, or of a great traveler, although I have made much meat in my time and fought for my people both as a boy and a man, and have gone far and seen strange lands and men. So also have many others done, and better than I. These things I shall remember by the way, and often they may seem to be the very tale itself, as when I was living them in happiness and sorrow. But now that I can see it all as from a lonely hilltop, I know it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people’s dream that died in bloody snow.
Narrative Writing that uses Language to create Mood
John Spargo
The Bitter Cry of the Children
Work in the coal breakers is exceedingly hard and dangerous. Crouched over the chutes, the boys sit hour after hour, picking out the pieces of slate and other refuse from the coal as it rushes past to the washers. From the cramped position they have to assume, most of them become more or less deformed and bent-backed like old men…
The coal is hard, and accidents to the hands, such as cut, broken, or crushed fingers, are common among the boys. Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machinery, or disappears in the chute to be picked out later smothered and dead. Clouds of dust fill the breakers and are inhaled by the boys, laying the foundations for asthma and miners’ consumption.
I once stood in a breaker for half an hour and tried to do the work a twelve year old boy was doing day after day, for ten hours at a stretch, for sixty cents a day. The gloom of the breaker appalled me. Outside the sun shone brightly, the air was (clear), and the birds sang in chorus with the trees and the rivers. Within the breaker there was blackness, clouds of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of the machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes filled the ears. I tried to pick out the pieces of slate from the hurrying stream of coal, often missing them; my hands were bruised and cut in a few minutes; I was covered from head to foot with coal dust…
Dr. Sampson Davis, George Jenkins , and Rameck Hunt
The Pact
WE TREAT THEM in our hospitals every day.
They are young brothers, often drug dealers, gang members, or small time criminals, who show up shot, stabbed, or beaten after a hustle gone bad. To some of medical colleagues, they are just nameless thugs, perpetuating crime and death in neighborhoods that have seen far too much of those things. But when we look into their faces, we see ourselves as teenagers, we see our friends, we see what easily could have become as young adults. And we’re reminded of the thin line that separates us- three twenty nine year old doctors (an emergency room physician, an internist, and a dentist) from these patients whose lives are filled with danger and desperation.
Each of us experienced friendships that could have destroyed our lives. We suspect that many of the young brothers we treat everyday in our hospitals are entangled in such friendships-friendships that require them to prove their toughness and manhood daily, even at the risk of losing their own lives. The three of us were blessed. We found in one another a friendship that works in a powerful way; a friendship that helped three vulnerable boys grow into successful men; a friendship that ultimately saved our lives.