What is writing?
What do we write?
How is speech different than writing?
-Which of these differences do you think are especially important when teaching
writing>
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Why is writing difficult
Why teach writing?
Students exclaim, “Writing is hard!” And a teacherreplies, “Yes, but it can be
fun.” Teachers cry, “Teaching writing is hard!” And we, the authors of this action
tool, respond, “Yes, but it is rewarding.”
Simply stated, writing is not easy. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun,
rewarding, enlightening, reflective, and thought provoking. Writing is the vehicle
for communication and a skill mandated in all aspects of life. Parents write notes
for their children. Doctors write prescriptions. Automotive technicians write work
orders. Politicians write speeches. Grandparents write letters. Friends write e-
mails. Writing as communication is a daily activity. No matter their age, students
recognize the need to communicate in writing. As teachers, we are faced with the
task of helping students view writing as essential to learning.
In addition to promoting the need for good communication skills, teaching writing
provides opportunities for students to develop clear thinking skills. When students
are granted time to write and process their thoughts, they develop a way to analyze
their thinking. Through writing, they discover the channels of logic and the
pitfalls of fallacies. They begin to rely on cognitive reasoning instead of
impromptu thought. In turn, writing makes students responsible for their learning;
they cannot sit passively in the classroom. They must engage.
The most powerful argument for teaching writing is that we are members of the human
race, and as such, we’ve always had the innate desire to communicate in writing.
Prehistoric cave dwellers sketched on stone walls to express their accomplishments.
Egyptian priests used hieroglyphs to record their history. Moses delivered the Ten
Commandments on stone tablets to the Israelites. King John signed the Magna Carta
at the hands of feudal lords. Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of
Independence for a
new nation.
Written communication is no less important in
the classroom. Depicting historical reasons for writing and demonstrating how to
write promotes the belief that teachers are models of active writers. Students more
readily accept risks when teachers visually communicate their abilities to take
risks. Together students and teachers share an emotional commonality that leads to
building relationships. With a strong teacher-student connection, students welcome
the opportunity to express their thoughts, feelings, and reasoning in writing.
Writing is a developmental process that each student can successfully experience at
different levels when it’s approached systematically. Based on this premise, this
action tool presents the five stages of writing—prewriting, writing, revising,
editing, and publishing—in a manner that allows writing to be taught as a process.
So Why This Action Tool?
Strategies for Teaching Writing: An ASCD Action Tool makes writing in the classroom
manageable for both the teacher and the students. A blank sheet of paper can often
pull students down into confusion, and
many refrain from writing because they feel unable to make the leap from prewriting
to publishing. Together, teachers and students must approach writing as
conquerable.
The goal of this action
tool is to break the current
emphasis on merely assigning a paper and expecting
students to jump into the writing and, instead, provide them stepping-stones to
cross that river of
uncertainty and fear without getting swept away by
confusion and despair. These tools offer activities
that can be directly applied to students’ writing,
providing them with skills they can use over and
over again.
As writers, we understand the philosophy behind
the teaching of writing but recognize the need to go
beyond philosophy to direct instruction and materials to teach writing in the
classroom. Therefore, we
do not provide simple gimmicks; writing is not simple. We do, however, provide
activities that, when
strung together and connected, lead to success. Our
suggestion is to use this action tool as a whole curriculum and break it into
individual teaching activities. Teachers have the opportunity and responsibility
to identify activities that work for their students and
to walk the students through each stage of the
process, building on each activity until the students
produce a final, publishable paper. Teachers have
the responsibility to teach the strategies and then
empower students to find the process that works for
them as learners
The poet's trade, the writer's trade is a strange one. Chesterton
said, "Only one thing is needful--everything." J. L. Borges
(in di Giovanni, Halpern, & MacShane, 1973)
What is writing? A child in school might say that writing is an
exercise to improve penmanship; or, that it is an extension of talking to
oneself; or, perhaps, that it is conversation written down. Poets,
linguists, literary analysts and rhetoricians have likewise given their
definitions of writing. Perhaps writing is difficult to define because it
cannot be separated from thinking, creating, or even from life experiences.
As an act of communication it involves both a writer and a reader, as well
as words on a page. To be a writer, one needs to take all of this into
account; as Chesterton said, everything is relevant
