username@email.com
username@email.com
Now let’s turn our attention to some of the necessary skills in creating a clear, informative, and interesting text.
Receiving a message orally—whether it’s a presentation, speech, or radio ad—is quite a different process than reading. Because the speaker can employ body language, inflection, volume, and other elements, they can shape the message in a host of different ways. Here are some things to look for when listening:
Dialect: Is it apparent that the speaker is from a certain place? How is this affecting your reception of the message—many stereotypes crop up when speakers employ dialect. Point of view: Is the speaker coming at the issue from a particular angle, or are they simply reporting or telling something? Main idea vs Digression: Know what the speaker’s point is and when they are straying from it. This will help you clarify and understand their argument or statement. Of course, there are many more considerations when analyzing a spoken text. Be aware that the denotative words are always working in conjunction with connotative signals like the ones mentioned above.
When speaking yourself, you should also be conscious of these factors and how your audience is receiving them. Be clear, concise, stay on topic, and choose language that is appropriate for your audience and setting.
Now, let’s turn our attention back to the art of creating a good, solid piece of writing. We’ll review some of the basics of the process step-by-step. First, let’s look at what happens even before the pen hits the page.
“Writing is a fluid process created by writers as they work. Accomplished writers move back and forth between the stages of the process, both consciously and unconsciously. Young writers, however, benefit from the structure and security of following the writing process in their writing.”
Many students find writing to be a daunting task. They are easily overwhelmed by the most rudimentary of writing assignments and need you, their teacher, to provide steady guidance. As quoted above, students require the structure and security of a regimented process to help them get started. By teaching the following foundational elements of the writing process, you will give your students the tools they need to tackle whatever writing assignment they are given with confidence.
By bracketing out concern for anything other than generating ideas, good prewriting facilitates creativity and lateral thinking. Even though the process is designed to elicit free-flowing ideas, it’s important that prewriting have some structure. Otherwise, it can degenerate into unfocused daydreaming.
The best way to give structure to the prewriting process is to take notes on the ideas that are being generated. The following are some note-taking methods specific to the prewriting process that highlight the relationships between ideas and increase the likelihood of producing useful material.
Brainstorming is the process of generating ideas and information based on word associations. Brainstorming involves generating a list of words, phrases, names, and anything else that comes to a writer’s mind when he or she thinks about the topic at hand. Some students may balk at having to brainstorm, but it’s critical that you reinforce the idea that this is an important part of the writing process and one that will make the actual writing that much easier.
During brainstorming, writers don’t need to worry about the utility of the items on their lists. Brainstormed lists serve as raw material for the writing process; the main goal is to think of as many ideas as possible. After brainstorming a list, it’s helpful to go back through the list and try to group similar items together. After grouping the items, try to create a label for each group.
For example, if students are assigned a paper on a famous person, some brainstorming topics might include:
Free-writing is an unstructured, associative form of writing that closely mirrors the process of brainstorming. The idea behind free-writing is to designate a period of time—say ten minutes—during which you won’t stop writing, even forcing yourself to continue when you feel like you have no ideas.
Like brainstorming, free-writing allows a writer to focus on generating ideas without worrying about style and grammar. There’s no need to censor ideas; the goal is to write whatever you’re thinking and sort it out later.
Once the designated period of time has elapsed, the writer can choose to read through the free-writing, select one or two of the best ideas and then free-write again on those specific topics. This process is called looping. Several rounds of looping can help writers narrow down their thinking to a usable thesis.
Clustering explores the relationship between ideas by creating a map of concepts and their relationships to one another. Physically rendering the relationships between topics and ideas helps clarify thinking as well as reveal new directions for inquiry.
For instance, the beginning of a cluster map for a paper on Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” might look something like this:
Each group of connected circles represents a larger topic that can become a paragraph in an essay or paper. Circles in a cluster map also can include questions that arise during the course of creating the map.
After pre-writing comes the rough draft, the second stage of the writing process. This is the point at which the writer shapes his or her thoughts about the paper’s topic into sentences and paragraphs. At this point, it isn’t necessary to worry about correct grammar or spelling, or whether the paper is organized appropriately. The rough draft is the messy copy that gets the writer writing.
Creating a rough draft is a writer-centered activity, meaning that this is when the writer sharpens his or her thoughts about the content of the paper and finally decides what he or she wants to say in it.
During the revising, or third stage of writing, the student writer goes back over the rough draft and basically cleans up what has been written. During this stage, any spelling and/or grammar mistakes are corrected, ideas are organized so that they are cohesive and coherent, and sentences are refined so that they are as concise and accurate as possible. It is helpful for a writer to read their work aloud at this point, as a way of checking to see how the sentences and paragraphs flow.
Revising is a reader-centered activity in that the writer is now thinking about how the paper will be perceived by the reader. At this point, the writer should be asking him or herself questions like, “Will the reader need to know X before Y?,” or “Do my supporting points effectively convey the argument I’m trying to make?” These questions will help the writer to clarify the connections he or she has made between ideas and concepts.
After students revise their own writing, have them trade papers with each other so that they might revise each other’s work. Peer revising is very helpful to both the reader and the writer as they can learn from each other’s successes and mistakes. During this stage, they share their thoughts about what they have read and make suggestions for improvement.
The editing stage comes next. This is the point at which the writer does a final spell check, makes certain that grammar mistakes have been corrected, that any feedback from the peer revising exercise has been implemented, and that the paper is free of content errors.
After pre-writing, creating a rough draft, revising, and editing, the student has finally reached the final and most important stage: producing a final draft. This is the very neat, well-written and grammatically correct draft that the student submits to you, the teacher, for feedback.
“In actuality, the writing process is not a highly organized linear process, but rather a continual movement between the different steps of the writing model.”
There are a number of ways for teachers to help their students develop good writing skills. Encouraging students to start writing as soon as they can is the first and most primary method.
For a child to write meaningfully and with pride, he or she must first hone their fine motor skills. Activities that encourage growth in this area include:
Practicing writing includes scribbling with pencils, pens, markers, or crayons. When a child is very young and is just beginning to show an interest in writing, make paper and writing utensils available at all times. Doing so will encourage any and all efforts the child shows to write and allows the child a chance to practice their newfound interest.
When a child makes circles and other basic shapes, discuss these attempts with him or her in a positive way. Point out shapes and draw them together. Have stencils available for tracing and encourage the child to look at and talk about their work.
Once a child has progressed past the rudimentary writing skills mentioned above, the push to develop his or her writing begins to include reading, too. This is because reading and writing go hand-in-hand. The ability to read is influenced by the ability to write and vice versa. By encouraging reading, the student gains a definite advantage as a writer.
Word recognition is key in developing reading skills. When teaching word recognition, try the following:
Once the student shows that he or she has a grasp of some vocabulary words, encourage that student to practice writing those words. Writing improves through practice and positive feedback. Have students write letters to family members, thank you notes, notes to or about their favorite literary characters, or even their own poems and stories.
The purpose of writing is to communicate thoughts and ideas. This very fundamental concept should form the basis of any writing development activities you plan for your students. The following activities utilize this idea while encouraging an interest in creative writing:
A dialogue journal is a notebook or journal kept by two people, usually a student and their teacher. Each party writes entries that are either related to a given topic or are responses from a designated reading. The journal is exchanged after each entry is completed.
When assigning a dialogue journal, it’s important to be creative. Adapt each activity to the learner’s needs. Emphasize to your students that reading and writing fluency is important, that spelling and handwriting are critical because writing, after all, is simply a way of communicating ideas.
The benefits of assigning a dialogue journal include:
Conference writing is an activity that encourages writers to discuss and share their work with an individual or group.
The steps for conference writing are short and easy to follow. First, have each student select a topic to write about. Second, discuss the selected topic with the writer. And finally, have each writer or group start off by writing a rough draft. Now, this sounds like any other kind of writing, but in this activity, the writers are encouraged to express their thoughts and ideas freely, without fear of having to follow any writing rules.
Here are some guidelines to follow when you use conference writing:
Here are a few other ways to vary the group:
At the end of the activity, distribute the final drafts around the group and encourage the class to read all of the newly written stories.
Guided writing is an individual or group activity where students use word maps to organize their ideas before writing.
Word maps are used to show relationships between words. You begin creating a word map by writing a word in a central circle. Next, ask students to brainstorm words that are related to the first focus word. As the students come up with appropriate words, write them around the focus word and link them with lines. Related words could include:
Word maps encourage writers to make connections between new words and words they already know. By mapping relationships between words, students are able to expand their vocabulary, which, in turn, assists in the development of their writing skills.
Steps to guided writing:
Inventive spelling is the practice of allowing beginning readers and writers to write any way they want. This promotes the idea that the act of writing is more important than correctness of form and spelling. Eventually, the student will learn to use the correct form. Inventive spelling allows student writers to write independently before they are able to spell and encourages creative writing as a means of self-expression.
Fluency should be one of the goals stressed at the beginning of each writing lesson. Fluency refers to the transfer of the flow of speech to the written word. A significant part of developing writing skills depends on the ability to visualize spoken words, phrases, and sentences as they are heard and write them in their entirety, as opposed to writing them syllable by syllable.
Steps to follow in a fluency writing activity:
Fluency in writing guidelines:
There are many ways to teach writing skills to students. Young writers benefit from well-developed fine motor skills, while older writers benefit from well-planned writing activities such as: