Becky Webb’s third-grade classroom was very quiet Thursday morning, with only the sounds of pencils scribbling on paper.

After five minutes of intense thinking and sentence construction, Idaho author Gary Hogg stopped the students and showed them how to revise what they had just written.

“The most important part of writing is revising,” he said. “In life, the bravest thing we do is change what we’ve already done.”

All the students at Fernan STEM Academy got to attend an assembly and spend about an hour learning how to write like an author from Hogg, who writes children’s books.

His school assembly and writer’s workshops are part of the “Meet an Author! Be an Author!” EXCEL grant that brings authors into the school to help inspire students to read, write and think critically.

“Kids get in the habit of saying the same thing the same way, but we all have our own way at looking at the world and we all have our own voice,” Hogg said. “Instead of approaching things just as an assignment, I want kids to see it as an opportunity to express what they feel and know.”

Hogg’s writing session with students focused on using “author words” instead of third-grade words, or fourth-grade words or fifth-grade words.

Basic words, such as “mad,” “day,” or “scared,” are what Hogg calls categories. These words don’t mean much and there are many more descriptive and more accurate words one can use.

Hogg led an exercise where he said a category word, and students could raise their hands if they thought of a better, more descriptive word. For example, he prompted the students with the word “scared.” Students then offered up replacement words such as “petrified,” “frightened,” “paralyzed” and “shy.”

“All these words mean different things,” Hogg told the third-graders. “If you just use “mad,” you didn’t give the reader enough information.”

After the students took five minutes to write a few sentences about something that happened to them, they went back and looked for category words they could exchange for better words.

Some of the students got to share their rewrites with the group.

Webb, one of the third-grade teachers, said her class is currently writing their own books, complete with tables of content, pictures with captions and text. The class has been working on the books since before winter break.

Milo Griebel, one of the third-graders, said he sometimes writes for fun and likes making up stories. He also writes letters to his grandma.

He said his favorite part of the assembly and writer’s workshop was listening to some of the funny stories Hogg shared with them. He also said he’ll use what he learned about author words in his nonfiction book for class.

Riley Snelson, another third-grader, said Hogg taught him most about adding details to his writing. Snelson said he’s been writing his own books for about a year and now will add more details to them “so when you read it, it doesn’t sound like a robot.”

Webb said she was impressed how focused her kids were during the writing lesson — noting that complete silence was rare.

“It was intense in a good way. It required a lot of stamina and focus from the kids,” she said. “It was effective to write for five minutes without interruption; it showed how important that is.”