More and more, my clinical work with individual students is focused on writing rather than spelling. That's because it's what my students and their families want when they seek my services, and I think that's because schools are woefully short on writing instruction and practice, and because some very forward-thinking parents understand that in a world increasingly infected with AI, the real, human ability to compose real, human text unaided will become an even rarer and more valuable skill into the future.
I just met with an 8th grader in Australia, and I asked him, as a review, "Do you remember the three aspects of information we look for when we are previewing a book or article?" This is something we have studied together many times, and knowing how to preview a text before reading it is like knowing how to look at a roadmap before driving somewhere.
He paused.
"It's OK if you don't remember," I said. "I don't mean this as a quiz. I just need to figure out what we might need to review."
"Is it logos and ethos?" he asked. "Is that two of the three?"
While those answers were technically incorrect, I was really impressed that he remembered those terms from other topics we have studied together. I shared my screen with him and started to sketch out the difference between what he was remembering – the three modes of persuasion in classical rhetoric – and the question I had actually asked him, when I realized that his thinking really wasn't erroneous because the two triads are absolutely conceptually connected, something I was only just noticing as I typed.
"You know what, Danesh?" I asked him. "I've never noticed this before, but the aspects of previewing and the aspects of rhetoric actually match up! I just never realized it before because previewing is something we do as a reader, and rhetoric is something we do as a writer. Let me show you."
Here's what I sketched out for him, and the three Pop-Up classes inspired by this work, to close out 2026:
October 9 ~ Rhētorikē Tekhnē: The Art of Persuasion
November 18 ~ Looking Ahead: How to Preview Text
December 13 ~ Do You Know Verbs? What They Are and How to Teach Them