How to Best Teach Writing

This week’s article summary is Scientific Evidence on How to Teach Writing is Slim.

About 30 years ago, my wife and I tutored the same student. We’d go to his house every Saturday, my wife working with him for an hour on math followed by me spending time with him on writing. At the end of the two hours, we’d meet with the boy’s mom on progress we were making with the child. My wife always had very detailed corrections, clarifications, and adjustments she had made with him in math, while I was pretty vague about his progress in writing, because, after all, working a hour a week with a reluctant writer is not a recipe for rapid writing improvement.

I didn’t know it then, but there are two simple rules for becoming a better writer: read a lot and write a lot.

We typically get better at something we like to practice and care about. If you don’t like to read, you probably don’t reach for a book in your idle time. And often, if you don’t read, you probably don’t do much writing either.

We are halfway done with our Embolden Your Inner Writer course for faculty and staff. Jill, Marsha, and I designed the class with the principal goal of making reading and writing enjoyable, meaningful, and habitual.

When I was a student, writing was a puzzle that I couldn’t decipher. And when I got my compositions back from teachers, all the their markings (in blood red, of course) made the puzzle even more confusing. (I’m hoping my English teachers weren’t so naïve as to think I actually read and reflected on the comments they wrote about how to improve my writing; like most other kids, I looked at the grade, then crumbled up the composition in a ball and tossed it in the trash can.)

Our Inner Writer course separates writing into two distinct parts: content and craft. Our belief is too many of us grow frustrated with writing because we jump past the content (ideas) and get overly consumed with craft (revising and editing content).

But in reality it’s content that’s more interesting. We all have thoughts, feelings, ideas, and opinions; we all have stories in our lives—those that are funny, poignant, inspirational, etc. Focusing on content during the drafting process lets us explore ourselves; it’s fun and freeing to write more intuitively, allowing your mind and thoughts to go in unpredictable directions. I used to think that writing in a diary was self-indulgent, but I’m guessing there is a correlation between those who wrote in a diary and those who are now confident writers.

Revising (is the content of what I’ve written clear and complete?) and editing (did I follow the standard conventions of writing?) are secondary to content. Yes, we need to get there but too often prospective writers get bogged down, bored, and intimidated by focusing too much on the standard rules of writing. When should I use who, when should I use whom?

In preparing for our Inner Writer course, I read a number of books on the writing process. My favorite was On Writing by Stephen King, the horror writer. I was  fascinated that when he writes a new novel, he doesn’t first dutifully lay out the plot in a sequence as I assumed. Rather, he writes based on a situation: for example, what happens if dead family pets buried in the backyard come back to life? Then he just lets his imagination run wild within that scenario and focuses on content, content, content. After he completes the initial rough draft, he waits at least a month before beginning to revise and edit.

I certainly hope our eleven intrepid faculty and staff are seeing that writing is more about freedom and habit than rules and structure. And I hope many more of you at some point get to take the course with us!

But I really wish 30 years ago, I had just sat with the boy I was tutoring and talked with him about his interests and passions and then just let him write without worry about spelling, punctuation, etc.

Joe

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The poor quality of student writing is a common lament among college professors. But how are elementary, middle and high school teachers supposed to teach it better?

This is an area where education research doesn’t offer educators clear advice.

“What’s very odd about writing is how small the research base is,” said Robert Slavin, director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. “There’s remarkably very little high-quality evidence of what works in writing.”

Compared to subjects such as math and reading, the amount of research on how to teach writing is tiny. Earlier in 2019, Slavin searched for rigorous research on teaching writing from second grade to high school. He found only 14 studies that met their standards. By contrast, he found 69 studies just on teaching reading to high school students.

Many popular writing programs used in schools around the country, such as Writer’s Workshop or the Hochman Method, might both be excellent teaching methods but there are no controlled studies of their effectiveness. However, a large scientific study of Writer’s Workshop is underway and results are expected in 2021.

The 14 studies looking at 12 different writing programs were described in Slavin’s 2019 review. Some focused on explicitly teaching the writing process from planning to drafting to revising, others emphasized working with classmates and making writing a communal activity, and one other was to integrate reading with the writing.

It turns out all three approaches worked some of the time but none clearly outshone the others.

One broad lesson that emerges from the study was that students benefit from step-by-step guides to writing in various genres. Argumentative writing, for example, is very different from fiction writing.

Another lesson is that students also need explicit grammar and punctuation instruction but it should be taught in the context of their writing, not as a separate stand-alone lesson.

“Motivation seems to be the key,” Slavin wrote. “If students love to write, because their peers as well as their teachers are eager to see what they have to say, then they will write with energy and pleasure. Perhaps more than any other subject, writing demands a supportive environment, in which students want to become better writers because they love the opportunity to express themselves, and to interact in writing with valued peers and teachers.”

It may be that nearly every thoughtful writing curriculum is likely to produce results because it’s making kids write more than they currently are. In this country, pressure to score well on reading and math tests has pushed writing instruction down the priority list so there isn’t a lot of time spent on writing instruction.