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-longlong, 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.
As soon as my mother, my brother, and I moved to the projects in a building on
Muhammad Ali Avenue, my mom started working to get us out. She was a proud
woman, and she didn’t like living in public housing. She wanted to make it on her
own. Raised on a farm with eight brothers and sisters in Warrenton, South Carolina,
she had been taught to fend for herself. She developed a toughness that at times
made her emotionless, but her determination and consistency stabilized our lives. I
never saw life break her down. If she struggled to pay the bills-and I know there
must have been times when she did-her children never saw it. When Garland and I
did well, she praised us without gushing. And we knew better than to expect a
reward for doing what we were expected to do, like cleaning our room or making a
good grade on a report card.
Luis Rodriguez
Always Running
Late winter in Chicago, early 1991: The once-white snow, which fell in December,
had turned into a dark scum, mixed with ice-melting salt, car oil and decay. Icicles
hung from rooftops and windowsills like the whiskers of old men.
For months, the bone chilling “hawk” swooped down and forced everyone in the
family to squeeze in a one-and-a-half bedroom apartment in a gray-stone, three flat
building in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. Inside tensions built up like fever as
we crammed around the TV set or kitchen table, the crowding made more
intolerable because of heaps of papers, opened file drawers and shelves packed with
books that garnered every section of empty space (a sort of writer’s torture
chamber.)
Richard Wright
Block Boy
One winter morning in the long’ go, four year old days of my life I found myself
standing before a fireplace, warming my hands over a mound of glowing coals,
listening to the wind whistle past the house outside. All morning my mother had
been scolding me, telling me to keep still, warning me that I must make no
noise. And I was angry, fretful, and impatient. In the next room Granny lay ill and
under the day and night care of a doctor and I knew that I would be punished if I did
not obey.
I’m still haunted by dreams of the time we lived on Mr. Carter’s plantation. Lots of
Negroes lived on his place. Like Mama and Daddy they were all farmers. We all
lived in rotten wood two-room shacks. But ours stood out from others because it
was up on the hill with Mr. Carter’s big white house, overlooking the farms and the
other shacks below. It looked just like the Carter’s barn with a chimney and a porch,
but Mama and Daddy did what they could to make it livable. Since we had only one
big room. It was like three rooms in one.
The Dialogue Lead:
A Mango-Shaped Space
By: Wendy Mass:
“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs,” says my best friend, Jenna Davis, as we climb
farther down into the steep, parched ravine. We’ve been inseparable since we were
five and her mother brought her to my house to play. We bonded over the various
ways we could contort my Barbie and Ken dolls without breaking them. Let’s just
say that Ken won’t be having children anytime soon and leave it at that.
Ida B.
By: Katherine Hannigan
“Ida B,” Mama said to me on one of those days that start right and just keep heading
toward perfect until you go to sleep, “when you’re done with the dishes, you can go
play. Daddy and I are going to be working till dinner.”
Gathering Blue
By: Lois Lowry
“Mother?”
There was no reply. She hadn’t expected one. Her mother had been dead now for
four days, and Kira could tell that the last of the spirit was drifting away.
Love, Ruby Lavender
By: Deborah Wiles
“Murderers! You can’t have them all!” Ruby Lavender leaned out the car window
and shook her fist. The car lurched to a halt in the dirt yard of Peterson’s Egg Ranch,
and Ruby scrambled out the door. She ran in bare feet as fast as she could into a
dusty sea of chickens—a sea of chickens being herded toward their death at the
chopping block
The Action Lead:
Igraine the Brave
By: Cornelia Funke
Igraine woke up because something was crawling over her face. Something with a
lot of legs. She opened her eyes and there it was, sitting right on the end of her nose,
a fat black spider. Igraine was scared stiff of spiders.
Milkweed
By: Jerry Spinelli
I am running.
That’s the first thing I remember. Running. I carry something, my arm curled around
it, hugging it to my chest. Bread, of course. Someone is chasing me. “Stop! Thief!” I
run. People. Shoulders. Shoes. “Stop! Thief!”
When Zachary Beaver Came to Town
By: Kimberly Willis Holt
Nothing ever happens in Antler, Texas. Nothing much at all. Until this afternoon,
when an old blue Thunderbird pulls a trailer decorated with Christmas lights into
the Dairy Maid parking lot. The red words painted on the trailer cause quite a buzz
around town, and before an hour is up, half of Antler is standing in line with two
dollars clutched in hand to see the fattest boy in the world.
The Last Treasure
By: Janet S. Anderson
It is night, just after midnight on June 8. Somewhere in the Midwest on a rickety bed
in a cheap motel, a boy who never dreams is dreaming. His dream is crazy, and he
thrashes restlessly, trying even in his sleep to shake it into sense. Miles away, almost
half the country away, in a tract house in a California town, a girl who dreams too
often is sinking into nightmare. She’s had other nightmares, but this one is different.
This one is worse.
The Thought Lead:
So B. It
By: Sarah Weeks
If truth was a crayon and it was up to me to put a wrapper around it and name its
color, I know just what I would call it—dinosaur skin. I used to think, without really
thinking about it, that I knew what color was. But that was a long time ago, before I
knew what I know now about both dinosaur skin and the truth.
California Blue
By: David Klaas
I don’t know why running through a redwood forest has always made me think of
death.
It’s not because I grew up in a mill town—I don’t run between the trees seeing fivehundred-foot-tall piles of sawdust or neatly stacked lumber or endless reams of
paper. And it’s not because of the darkness where the old growth is thickest,
although as I pounded along the narrow forest trail, the massive trees pressed in
against each other in the twilight, and the smell of the wood and leaves was damp
and lightly sweet and faintly bloodlike.
The Name of this Book is Secret
By: Pseudonymous Bosch
WARNING: DO NOT READ BEYOND THIS PAGE!
Good.
Now I know I can trust you.
You’re curious. You’re brave. And you’re not afraid to lead a life of crime.
But let’s get something straight: if, despite my warning, you insist on reading this
book, you can’t hold me responsible for the consequences
The Descriptive Lead:
The Last Treasure
By: Janet S. Anderson
It is night, just after midnight on June 8. Somewhere in the Midwest on a rickety bed
in a cheap motel, a boy who never dreams is dreaming. His dream is crazy, and he
thrashes restlessly, trying even in sleep to shake it into sense. Miles away, almost
half the country away, in a tract house in a California town, a girl who dreams too
often is sinking into nightmare. She’s had other nightmares, but this one is different.
This one is worse.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
By: J.K.Rowling
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were
perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be
involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such
nonsense.
Iqbal
By Francesco D’Adamo (Translated by: Ann Leonori)
The house of our master, Hussain Khan, was in the outskirts of Lahore, not far from
the dusty, dry countryside where flocks of sheep from the north grazed.
It was a big house…
Atherton: House of Power
By: Patrick Carman
In Mr. Ratikan’s grove there lived a boy. He was not well-to-do, but his needs were
met and he was happy most of the time. His name was Edgar.
The Problem Question Lead
James and the Giant Peach
By: Roald Dahl
Until he was four years old, James Henry Trotter had had a happy life. He lived
peacefully with his mother and father in a beautiful house beside the sea. There
were always plenty of other children for him to play with, and there was the sandy
beach for him to run about on, and the ocean to paddle in. It was the perfect life for a
small boy.
The Hunger Games
By: Suzanne Collins
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking
Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must
have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the
day of the reaping.
Things Not Seen
By Andrew Clements
It’s a Tuesday morning in February, and I get up as usual, and I stumble into the
bathroom to take a shower in the dark. Which is my school-day method because it’s
sort of like an extra ten minutes of sleep.
It’s after the shower. That’s when it happens.
It’s when I turn on the bathroom light and wipe the fog off the mirror to comb my
hair. It’s what I see in the mirror. It’s what I don’t see.
I took a second time, and then rub at the mirror again.
I’m not there.
That’s what I’m saying.
I’m. Not. There.
The Wednesday Wars
By: Gary D. Schmidt
Of all the kids in the seventh grade at Camillo Junior High, there was one kid that
Mrs. Baker hated with heat whiter than the sun.
Me.
And let me tell you, it wasn’t for anything I’d done.
Boys are Dogs
By: Leslie Margolis
Summer was officially over. There would be no more swimming, snorkeling, or
bodysurfing in the cool blue waves. No more relay races, and no more circling the
campfire to sing songs and toast marshmallows.
The Narrative Lead:
Every Soul a Star
By: Wendy Mass
In Iceland, fairies live inside of rocks. Seriously. They have houses in there and
schools and amusement parks and everything.
Besides me, not many people outside of Iceland know this. But you just have to read
the right books and it’s all there. When you’re homeschooled, you have a lot of
books. I also know how to find every constellation in the sky, and that the brightest
star in any constellation is called the Alpha. I know all the constellations because my
father taught them to me, and I know about the Alpha because it is also my name.
But my family and friends call me Ally.
Belle Prater’s Boy
By: Ruth White
Around 5:00 a.m. on a warm Sunday morning in October 1953, my Aunt Belle left
her bed and vanished from the face of the earth.
Al Capone Does My Shirts
By: Gennifer Choldenko
Today I moved to a twelve-acre rock covered with cement, topped with bird turd
and surrounded by water. Alcatraz sits smack in the middle of the bay—so close to
the city of San Francisco, I can hear them call the score on a baseball game on
Marina Green. Okay, not that close. But still.
Chasing Vermeer
By: Blue Balliett
On a warm October night in Chicago, three deliveries were made in the same
neighborhood. A plump tangerine moon had just risen over Lake Michigan. The
doorbell had been rung at each place, and an envelope left propped outside.
The Changeling
By: Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Martha Abbott woke up on the seventh day of April and sat straight up in bed with
her eyes wide open. That in itself, was significant. As long as she could remember
she had always awakened slowly and cautiously, testing yesterday gingerly with the
tip of memory, before taking the plunge into cold bright consciousness. But on that
April morning she had no choice. Something had reached deep into her dream and
jolted her awake—and then quickly faded, leaving behind only four definite words.
Something’s going to happen
The Flat Statement Lead:
The Teacher’s Funeral: A Comedy in Three Parts
By: Richard Peck
If your teacher has to die; August isn’t a bad time of year for it. You know August.
The corn is earring. The tomatoes are ripening on the vine. The clovers in full bloom.
There’s a little less evening now, and that’s a warning. You want to live every day
twice over because you’ll be back in the jailhouse of school before the end of the
month.