The best way to teach students to write well-crafted essays, Gallagher claims, is to consider how people learn to do anything unfamiliar. They carefully examine someone who knows how to do that thing and then emulate that person's actions. Just so, if teachers want students to write persuasive arguments, interesting explanatory pieces, and captivating narratives, they need to have students read high-quality arguments, explanatory pieces, and narratives. But it's not enough to just hand students a mentor text and ask them to imitate it. Rather, teachers should guide students to pay close attention to model texts before they write, while they are composing, and as they revise their drafts. Gallagher gives specific examples of how he guide his secondary students to closely read and extract craft lessons from model texts at all stages of the writing process.