About Writing…

The way to improve student writing is to ask students to write… and then ask them to write some more! If students do enough writing it begins to feel like a natural thing to do… a way to express who you are… a lot like talking, but more formal.

I know a six year old who contributed to her own literacy development by beginning to do self-assigned home work at the age of three. She made rows and rows of variously distorted small circles… progressed to learning some letters and then began asking for dictation… mostly peoples’ names. Part way through kindergarten she was suddenly a beginning reader… partly from instruction, partly from shear practice… practice that was part of her daily play routine, more tolerated than supported by surrounding adults. They supplied paper and crayons or pencils and (sometimes grudgingly) dictated. It was her work and she attacked it with a vengeance!

I know a thirteen-year-old who began a story at age ten about her “alien baby sister”, and wrote it for more than a year. It was all written in longhand in a notebook. Many hours were consumed. A cast of characters that was finally too numerous to keep straight emerged. At age twelve she began transcribing her story (now about 20 typed pages) onto the computer. I don’t think it will be published, but this writing marathon has made producing the paragraphs and pages for school assignments an opportunity for expression rather than a daunting task.

I have my college students write every week. They post their comments about visiting schools and reading articles to an online class site. They write comments on one another’s work. I join in, commenting too. Sometimes I feel a need to jump in and correct (privately) some really scary spelling… but most often I comment on content and praise the interest and excitement of their ideas. Over the course of a semester the 40 students generated nearly 1,000 postings.

I think the simple process of writing, even more than teacher correction, helps students grow in their ability for written expression. Sometimes we hesitate to assign writing because we worry about grading it. How to be fair, how to find the time. But reading students’ writing simply to learn about their ideas can be great fun; the time it takes flies by. So get them writing at any age or stage… and do not feel burdened to correct every paper. Once in a while a “formal writing” can be “formally corrected.” If we worried less about “grading” and more about getting them writing their growth might surprise us.#

Dr. Lorraine McCune is a professor at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. She can be reached at www.generalcreation.com in the “Ask Dr. McCune” section, or at www.educationupdate.com

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