Modeling, a prewriting technique helps students’ imagination, creativity, and writing skill to blossom. Also, it provides a concrete way of teaching and offers rewarding experiences for the students. It is a way of using another author’s work for inspiration and guidelines to launch a similar style of writing. “It’s purpose is to give you a structure, an aesthetic pattern to follow, within which to treat your own discovered content.” (Rico, pp. 44-46) It does not have to be a professional writer’s style, but could be a writing of anyone’s whom you admire. Both clustering and modeling can be used together to create a richer, more concise more evocative, more polished, more rhythmic” piece of writing. (Rico, pp. 44-46)
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. . .And even if you were in some
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prison the walls of which let none of
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the sounds of the world come to your
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senses—would you not then still
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have your childhood, that treasure-
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house of memories? Turn your
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attention thither. Try to raise the
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submerged sensations of that ample
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past: your personality will grow
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more firm, your solitude will widen
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and will become a dusky dwelling
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past which the noise of others goes
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by far away.
6
The following poetry assignment makes use of the clustering and modeling techniques. Write a poem about a childhood memory. Use specific imagery—feelings, sights, sounds, smells, touches and taste. Try to become totally immersed. Use a dominant impression for your kernel word and radiate other memories and associations out from that center. Write in a voice of a child or in the voice of memory of an adult (or both), but try to give attention to what a child would observe. Read the following poems for inspiration:
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“The Centaur” by May Swenson
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“Rough” by Stephen Spender
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“Sketch From Loss of Memory” by Sonya Dorman
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“Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend Called Felicity” by John Tobias
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“My Lost Youth” by Henry Wordsworth Longfellow
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“There was a Child Went Forth” by Walt Whitman
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“The Horse Chestnut Tree” by Richard Eberhart
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“The Ballad of the Light-Eyed Little Girl” by Gwendolyn Brooks
