Encouraging kids to write
Home learning in action (photo by Susan Main)
Have you ever noticed how many people hate writing? They dread the task and try to avoid it at all costs – and recently I gained some new insight into why they may feel this way.
Writer and teacher Susan Wise Bauer describes writing as a two-part process:
1) Putting the idea into words (in your mind)
2) Putting the words onto paper
It sounds simple. However, many students never learned to break it down this way. Teachers tend to approach writing like language immersion: just keep doing it as much as you can and you’ll figure it out. While this may work for a few people, it’s not effective for everyone – hence all those “I hate writing” folks.
According to Wise Bauer – who wrote a series of books called Writing With Ease: Strong Fundamentals – we learn speech as a part of natural development. Writing, however, is different; Wise Bauer says: “written language is an unnatural foreign language, an artificially constructed code.” Written language comes with rules and conventions – like punctuation and appropriate use of capitals – that writers must learn before they can communicate effectively.
The act of writing will not feel “natural” until you are accustomed to these conventions. To be clear, I’m talking about “old school” grammatically correct writing – not texting or online messaging, which is almost like a different genre of writing, in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong: I love all the online acronyms and text message jargon and I think this is a totally valid way of communicating.
The Writing With Ease series is mainly for parents of home learners (like me) and also for people who want to enhance what their kids are learning in regular school programs. Each lesson is quick (10 to 20 minutes) and straightforward, starting with me reading a story aloud.
I ask him questions about the story, which gives him practice putting his thoughts into words. I write his answers to the questions, while he watches and sees how it’s done – how there are capitals and punctuation, etc. – then he copies the text I wrote.
This process breaks down the task, and eventually written communication feels more manageable. I wonder if the people who hate writing would feel differently if they had learned this way. Maybe they would not create what Wise Bauer sees in her college level classes: “incoherent, fragmented, unpunctuated papers written by students who graduated from well-funded high schools with small classrooms and qualified teachers.”
I’ve heard similar comments from friends who are teaching assistants and instructors of college and university students. They are shocked to see how terrible most of the writing is. Wise Bauer blames it on early education: “I have become convinced that most writing instruction is fundamentally flawed because children are never taught the most basic skill of writing, the skill on which everything rests: how to put words down on paper.”
After a few weeks using this method, I’m glad to report my son is starting to like writing, in small doses. He even started a LiveJournal blog recently (though the novelty has worn off a bit). Later, we will check out the writing prompts at a cool website called Children Write the Future – which I learned about via Twitter from @writerdad.
Does your kid hate writing? Do you?
Thanks for sharing this, Susan! I am a writer, and it’s fascinating as both teacher and parent to see kids (and yes, adults) struggle with this.
I’m curious about this program though: in your description it does sound much like the classroom exercise of reading a story and answering “comprehension questions.” How is it different from that?
I’ve yet to meet a kid who actually likes answering these questions; for most, it destroys the joy of reading…so I tend to think the dislike of writing comes from the box we put it in so often, these comp. questions being just such a box.
So I’m interested in hearing how Writing with Ease finds a twist that causes it to be palatable…
Thanks!
Thanks Alison. I was hoping a teacher would respond!
The difference is that students answer the reading comprehension questions aloud – not in writing. The parent writes the answers on paper, then the student copies them. This breaks it down into a two-part process in that: A) they get to think and answer without having to write i.e. put the thought into words, then B) the student copies what you wrote.
The author says “the student begins to master the second part of the process without having to worry about the first, difficult task of putting ideas into words. The beginning student doesn’t even know how language is supposed to look. Before he can put words down on paper, he must have some visual memory of what those words are supposed to look like…”
But really young kids are given journal writing assignments and they have to sort out both of these processes at once. I think the pressure of it may cause them to stress out and develop a real dislike for writing. My son, who is extremely verbal, hated this process – as do lots of kids I know.
It would be hard to do this process in the classroom because it’s really a one-on-one activity. During the first part, you ask the question “Why did the dog eat the pie on the table?” and if the kid gives a fragment: “because he was hungry,” you ask them for a full sentence: “The dog ate the pie because he was hungry.” Eventually, says the author, the students’ minds are stocked with properly written language and then they can visualize written sentences and put them down on paper.
You could probably ask a question aloud and then write it out and have everyone copy it, but that’s not the same. That’s only one kid’s thought process.
I’ve got to say I have a lot of admiration for teachers. I just don’t know how you can manage with so many kids in a classroom!
I haven’t done a lot of full classroom-type teaching, but it does occur to me that you could have kids work in pairs, to discuss possible answers with each other. Let them know that they’re NOT TO USE pen or pencil until it’s fully discussed. Then their partner could write notes for them, using their vocabulary. Then they could develop their own full-sentence answers. (Full sentences always irritated me, too, in school. I’d lose my train of thought– barreling through that tunnel, as it does!–and get caught up in nothings.)
This would also fit well with the new BC curriculum’s mandate for oral language.
Great discussion! Thanks for this!
Hey Susan
I think we used to work together at ACT Laboratory /Media 360? If so, i’d love to hear from you. I’ve been living in New Zeland for the past 12 years!
Cheers,
Jude