HOW TO TEACH WRITING

HOW TO TEACH WRITING

1. Writing is a key skill. The ability to put words down on paper is a critical skill for success in college and career, but few students graduate high school as proficient writers.

2. Teaching argumentative writing

   • involves teaching both argumentation and writing. This means there’s research on how to teach writing,

3. Earlier research in this topic often referred to it as “persuasive” writing. More recent research seems to prefer and use the term “argumentative” writing. One reason why is that “argumentative” is seen as a broader term. Persuasion is a particular goal that argumentative writing might have. But argumentative writing is seen to encompass many possible goals: persuasion, but also analysis, collaborative problem-solving, and conceptual clarity.

4. Main takeaways

   • Students need sufficient foundational skills and knowledge (in spelling, typing, content-specific knowledge) and may be taught some of this knowledge in the course of writing.
   • Students need sufficient foundational skills and knowledge (in spelling, typing, content-specific knowledge) and may be taught some of this knowledge in the course of writing.
   • Students benefit from clear writing purposes and from having well-defined goals for improvement.
     • Students benefit from instruction on models of good and bad writing, and through explicit strategies in the writing process

5. Learning to Write

   • Writing is a complex skill involving the interaction of lots of different kinds of knowledge (e.g., “genre knowledge”, “subject matter knowledge”, “writing process knowledge”). This complexity makes it challenging to study. There is also an increasing recognition of the discipline- and genre-specific nature of writing. It’s not about teaching a single, relatively discrete skill — “writing” — but about teaching ways writing in science, ways of writing in history, ways of writing in literature.
     • Methods and Approaches
       • These are fairly comprehensive quantitative summaries of the work in this area, but a substantial number of the underlying studies have methodological problems of one sort or another: e.g., no random assignment, no controlling for the Hawthorne effect, no measures of whether the intervention was implemented with fidelity, or simply no descriptions of the control condition.

6. Main Takeaways About Learning To Write

   • Teachers don’t assign enough writing.
     • Explicit strategy instruction helps students.
       • Self-regulation strategies can improve outcomes.
         • Feedback Drives Achievement
           • Peer Collaboration Can Make A Difference.
             • Foundational skills and knowledge enable students to engage deeply with the material.
               • At the earliest ages, foundational skills like spelling, handwriting, and typing help develop overall writing skill. Even creative visualization exercises for young children seem to improve writing outcomes
                 • Students also need to know genre-specific writing structures and topic-specific vocabulary. For instance, young children have a better understanding of the narrative genre compared to other genres of writing (argumentative writing, scientific reports, poems).

7. Word processing lets students edit and revise more easily.

   • All of the evidence suggests that using word processors (instead of paper and pencil) to write papers improves writing outcomes, although this effect seems small in the earliest grades. In those grades, students insufficient familiarity with word processing software and low typing skills may get in the way.
     • Multiple drafts improve essay quality.
     • Writing can also improve reading.
     • Grammar instruction is important but not that helpful for more advanced writers.
       • skills improve overall writing skills, such as spelling, typing, and sentence-combining, generally speaking grammar instruction does not have a large impact.
       • grammar instruction does help students on grammar-related measures. But these measures have little to do with good writing (at least, according to most researchers).