✏️ 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow (#1-10)
How do you teach writing? Check out my list of twenty suggestions!
Teach Writing Tomorrow addresses major myths and misconceptions about teaching writing. It will move from attitudes to actions and mindset to methods, showing how any teacher, regardless of their own perceived ability or creativity, can teach writing tomorrow.
Introduction and Overview
In my hour long workshop “Help! I don’t know how to teach writing!”, I paired writing myths with teaching activities. But that first version was wordy and bulky and extended well beyond its scope. When I moved from attitudes to actions, the talk became two things and grew in complexity until it tripped on its own shoestrings.
Lesson learned.
In the meantime, as I simplified and streamlined my talk, I tried regrouping those positive suggestions as their own list. Then I decided to write blurbs and the results grew and grew wild like vines. Suddenly I had twenty-plus suggestions and seventy-plus paragraphs. All unplanned. So I streamlined again, splitting the list to two posts. (I'm sure I forgot other maxims, but I kept returning to this core list.)
These posts will suggest twenty tips for teaching writing tomorrow. Some topics deserve whole chapters while others will combine into chapters. Many of the described activities will get full treatments later with concrete, hands-on checklists. I try to address as many big picture topics as possible within the two to four paragraph constraints. Regardless, until future chapters are published, these blurbs as previews will suffice.
How do you teach writing? I’m convinced there are many possible “correct” ways. But frameworks need foundations. If you’re not sure, want to learn, or want new ideas, read on.
Note: If you missed the Introduction, check out the following posts:
The Full List
1. Write every day. Write relentlessly. But start small.
2. Stress polished, not perfect.
3. Give permission to make mistakes.
4. Embrace surprises and non-linear growth.
5. Embrace writing as both means and ends.
6. Treat writing as an extension of speech. (Ground writing in speech.)
7. Focus on questions over answers.
8. Stress meaning over mechanics.
9. Collect and curate student writing.
10. Create comment archives.
11. Embrace tests as learning opportunities.
12. Write collaboratively with students.
13. Students write for other students. (Or Students read student writing.)
14. Add regular peer review.
15. Add regular writing conferences.
16. Teach using text structures.
17. Teach writing across the mediums.
18. Transform writing across mediums.
19. Make everything connect.
20. Add choice to add voice.
The List (#1-10)
1. Write every day. Write relentlessly. But start small.
How do you teach writing? Make it routine. If you write only occasionally, you’ll only occasionally see results. But if writing is part of the normal, daily routines, you’ll see normal, daily results. And I’m not talking results like the dramatic before and after weight loss pictures. Nope. Just simple, gradual, and almost imperceptible improvements.
Future posts will describe my ever evolving daily journals. Students have a writing notebook that stays in a bookshelf in the classroom. My daily objectives have the prompt, which either previews the day’s topic or practices retrieval practice. After the embedded timer runs out, students count their sentences each day. We grade journals with brief, weekly writing conferences, grading for fluency. Mistakes are circled and discussed, but held non-punitive.
When August turns to April, we review past writing. In a normal year, students typically marvel how they have improved. How is this, they wonder? When they review their initial daily writings, they realize how and why the journals helped. The beauty is never explaining it: When students flip through their journals, the results tend to speak for themselves.
For more, check out my series on daily writing notebooks!
2. Stress polished, not perfect.
The single biggest psychological barrier to writing is writing for perfection. It confuses endings for beginnings. It ignores process. It divorces writing from dialogue, splitting the spoken and written word. It disconnects, distorts, and discourages. When teachers expect perfection without drafting, why even start? Perfection encourages avoidance.
Instead, stress polished over perfect. Polished means process. Polished embraces becoming and changes “Oh no!” to “Oops!”. Mistakes just happen. Polished embraces due dates instead of perfection, and once students view revision as normal, even grammar means a means to an end. Polishing quite literally makes more clear. We fear perfect because it’s unattainable; we should love polished because everyone can improve.
3. Give permission to make mistakes.
Each year, I start by giving my students permission to make mistakes. This typically catches them off guard. (“What do you mean I don’t have to have it perfect? Isn’t that the point?”) If writing is polished, then polishing becomes process. Mistakes present opportunities for growth. We quite literally can’t improve without making mistakes. Unless your classroom has the culture that celebrates—and occasionally laughs at—mistakes, then the fear of being wrong will paralyze any growth.
Free your students—and yourself—by creating a culture that learns from mistakes. They’re only human. You’re only human.
4. Embrace surprises and non-linear growth.
The child is not the curriculum map. No matter how clean curriculum maps look—and no matter how many buzzwords you add—you can’t predict growth. Sometimes students just get an idea and move on. Other times you try everything and secretly feel like a failure. But then something will click and students just… grow.
When teaching writing, embrace the surprises. Sometimes topics motivate. Sometimes questions motivate. Sometimes nothing motivates. But don’t be surprised when it’s not predictable. Sometimes students just mature, and sometimes they just… grow.
5. Embrace writing as both means and ends.
Writing acts as means and ends, journey and destination. Otherwise, writing as destination only disconnects and distorts. The sum becomes less than its parts. If we split spelling and grammar from writing, each becomes a mini-subject. Nothing points to anything. We can only cover and improve in isolation. Diagnostics become destinations. Data obfuscates and obliterates. We measure everything and move nowhere. In some sense, we live disconnected lives.
Instead, the integrated view weaves together reading and writing, speaking and listening. It’s raw, honest, and organic. Everything becomes potential learning experience: Just change your lens. While exploring ideas, we stop and review our wording. Work towards clarity and brevity. As we will explore later, the integrated view should transform writing across structures, mediums, and audiences.
6. Treat writing as an extension of speech.
We should always integrate reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Move from one to the other and then back. Ground writing in speaking. The examples and applications prove numerous, organic, and richer than any sanitized corporate textbook:
Have students watch a short movie clip, no longer than a minute or two, and transcribe the dialogue. Draft it as play, then convert to prose. (For more, see #17: Transforming writing across mediums.)
Before class discussions, have students write their opinions. Even if they don’t speak, they’re involved. If they didn’t write before, then reflect afterwards.
James Moffett observed that writing should begin as inner speech directed outwards—from inner monologues to dialogues to writing for ever-increasing audiences and distances.
Afraid to teach writing? Betcha you’re not afraid of speaking. Just move between them and teach style, grammar, and tone through sheer application. No complicated PowerPoint’s necessary. If you embrace the complexity of everyday speech, you’ll find an infinite well. Studying this tenant of James Moffett’s philosophy could consume a college course!
7. Focus on questions over answers.
Focusing on questions doesn’t mean answers are irrelevant or anything goes. Instead, focusing on questions means focusing on dialogue. Writing incorporates information into something greater. Easy verbs include analysis, interpretation, and so on. These tasks both depend on and connect facts. But disconnected facts become forgotten facts.
Many classes focus on answers, though. Rather than explore analysis or interpretation, they end with memorized study guides. (And don’t get me wrong: We need information to pull without thinking: subject-specific terms, Math facts, musical notes and so on.) But when memorization (answers) becomes all-encompassing and writing becomes “the extra thing,” then there’s a problem.
8. Stress meaning over mechanics.
Stressing meaning over mechanics means viewing grammar as a means rather than an end. As an end, grammar means endless worksheets and taxonomy. As an end, grammar has a hyper focus on right and wrong. As an end, grammar becomes mechanics without application. As an end, students have every right to believe it's boring and useless.
Because I can’t resist, let me point out the following: We speak in compound-complex sentences, yet students can’t identify them. And this isn’t an indictment on teachers, but bad standards. And goodness gracious, most academic standards are just junk.
Why do we learn grammar? For clear thinking. For clarity. When we stress meaning over mechanics, mechanics help meaning. If we free ourselves to make mistakes and focus on meaning, grammar takes its rightful place: As a tool. And while I’m against taxonomy for taxonomy’s sake (we have to know hammers are hammers and noun are nouns), let me just say it and scream it loud: Grammar is beautiful. Like other repeating patterns in nature.
9. Collect and curate student writing.
Students learn through student writing. This means reading voices like their own with similar styles and mistakes. Textbook examples prove fake--the uncanny valley of writing. Logically they answer the question, but their voice functions like the Math equivalent of advanced Mathematics for simple questions. So once you collect student writing, curating it for easy-print workshops and examples encourages rapid growth.
Collecting student writing takes practice until it becomes a habit. Digital writing works best, but typing on the computer opens so many avenues. (*Coughs* Cheating! *Coughs.*) Physical writing takes effort, because no matter what, converting to a copy-paste ready format means typing. Tagging and scanning examples helps archive, while typing representative examples also goes a long way.
But the logistics here deserve their own chapter and checklists.
10. Create comment archives.
If every teacher marks every mistake for every student for every essay ever--they'd mentally explode like a firecracker. As a rule, if you have to type something more than once, make a template. Without template, writing feedback means recognizing mistakes, recalling the appropriate feedback, recording the feedback on the paper, and repeating for each mistake. Five comments for five papers adds up, let alone scaled across dozens of essays per go. So why not grade with a notebook in hand and draft quick, one to two sentence comments using the 80-20 Rule?
Where do you start? Let's skip rationality and start with whatever mistakes both hit the 80-20 Rule and make you mad. Start with those emotional responses and then spiral outwards. Embed feedback into prompt sheets, create general medium-specific comments, and work far into the future. What if you freed mental energy from writing comments to just recognizing mistakes? What if you freed mental energy to recognize wider trends in writing?
Most of all, what if grading were... a joy?
To be continued…
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Adam, I am so happy I stumbled on this series about teaching writing. I struggle so much with this even though I’m a really capable writer myself. I have vacillated with teaching grammar over the years and can’t land on a satisfactory practice between the necessity of knowing it and the pointlessness of endlessly regurgitating it. I love the rationale you lay out in this essay. How do YOU teach grammar? Would love more explanation and direction. Thank you!
Thanks for this post and plethora of resources. Any suggestions for supporting students’ writing fluency at the sentence level for MS?