Book About Writing - Danny Iny, Strategic Communications

In February 2006, Danny Iny published Ordinary Miracles - Harness the power of writing and get your point across!, a book about communicating effectively in writing. It's informative and fun to read, with a five star () rating on Amazon.com and elsewhere.

Information for Educators

Ordinary Miracles is thorough enough to be used as a textbook for an academic writing course, and both short and affordable enough to be used as a supplementary text to another textbook. If you are teaching such a course and would like to be sent a free review copy, please contact me.

Reading and writing are possibly the most fundamental academic skills that we learn over the course of our elementary and high school careers. It is the skill that allows us to continue educating ourselves; a myriad of textbooks travel in a child’s knapsack every day - to school in the morning and back home in the afternoon. Without the fundamental skills of reading and writing, they're nothing but dead weight.

Reading tends to be learned quite early; by the end of the sixth grade, most children are proficient readers. Writing, on the other hand, is a completely different story; many high-school and even college graduates have writing skills that are simply appalling. Not only is their spelling and sentence structure poor, but they are unable to effectively communicate a position or idea in writing. This is a severe deficiency, and the solution to it – a proper understanding of the true nature of writing as a communicative process – is the subject of my book.

Many of the misconceptions that I address in my book are picked up by children in elementary and high-school, imparted to them by teachers who, despite having the best intentions, are relying on teaching strategies that don’t reflect the true nature of the writing process. Children learn to see writing as an onerous, unpleasant activity – a chore – and it is all downhill from there.

This section of the website is geared to help educators who want to show children what writing is really about – how important and enjoyable it can be, and how to do it well. The program is in the form of an eleven-lesson plan, each of which is based on a section of my book. While you are encouraged to read the book (you will get more out of the lesson plans that way), you should still be able to use them even if you haven’t.

The lessons are designed to be scalable – they should be useful to educators working with children ranging from the low elementary grades to the end of high-school. You can use these lessons as a stand-alone program (say 45 minutes, twice a week, for five weeks), or as a 15 minute addition to each class of your regular writing program. While they are written as a set, any one of them can be used on its own (except for lessons 6 and 7, which go together). The lessons are available for you to download – just right-click on the links below and save the files to your computer. Feel free to circulate these files (printouts or via email) to your colleagues – they’re yours to use, completely free.

I’m always interested to hear about the experiences of teachers using this material. If you have an experience that you would like to share, please contact me.

Lesson 1 - The greatest invention...