In one of our classroom workshops, we read the Sharon Olds poem, “The Death of Marilyn Monroe.” The narrative is about the first responders to the death scene.  The ambulance drivers must have known Marilyn the same we know Marilyn: beautiful, talented, seductive.  My students discuss what they must have felt when they saw her corpse.  What could they have said to each other on the trip to the morgue.  Was she really dead?  Could they believe their own eyes?Below, I try to model paragraph development with the help of a color code.  This fall, my students will reading a sixties novel and writing sixties research papers.  Some of them will be excited to write about Cesar Chavez, John F. Kennedy, the Moon Landing, Woodstock, but they will need help to understand where to begin and where to end.

  I hope Jay’s Color Code – Paragraph Key – will guide them step-by-step through their writing process.  I practice with the death of Marilyn Monroe.