How structured is your writing?

[Lara in Colo]

I'm partially HSing now, I have an on line school (which is great because they gave me a computer and pay for internet and books and extra $ for for whatever) HOWEVER... I find the writing to be restictive. My DD 9, 4th grade is a good writer and quite creative. Her current teacher (whom I really like) is following Colo Csap procedures and having her do the 5 steps of writing, (plan, 1 draft, revise, edit, & publish) Brenna will write a great, well written paper if I let her just go, if I make her do it the planned way, the paper is disorganized and she takes so long to do it we end up in tears. Do you all follow this structure stictly? I'm pulling her next year and doing this on my own, I'm just wondering if I should make her continue this way or let her do it her way. I find the over planning process to stifle the creativity in her.

 

 

Lara

[Already Gone]

I'm nowhere near this point with my kids, so take this with the proverbial grain of salt, but in the past I've taught college English, including multiple levels of composition, for years, and here's my take:

 

 

• Those particular formal steps in that order do sound potentially restrictive to me. A lot of people don't really know what they're going to write until they start writing; I've often told my students that if they know exactly what they're going to say before they start the paper, there's a problem. The writing process itself should ideally be one of discovery. That said, two big caveats:
  
• First, one should be able to produce a coherent outline at the end of the writing process, if not at some point during the process. That is, if you can't outline the ideas and see a logical structure, your paper might just be disorganized. I've often recommended that students do an outline as a second-to-last step just to double check their structure.
  
• Second, I can't emphasize enough that revision is a really, really important skill. Generalizing here, but the main failing I've seen in about 99.9% of my students is their inability to envision alternatives to the way they have put things (and then, ideally, to chose the best alternative among several). Every, every, every piece of writing, no matter how impressive the first draft, could stand to go through some kind of revision process, and I firmly believe that every, every, every writer can benefit from it. Revision--if by this we mean carefully considering your own writing choices, as opposed to some mechanistic process--is where you really grapple with your own work and learn to improve yourself. I'm hoping that sounds passionate rather than preachy. :)
  

 

My two cents--hope that's not too impractical of an answer. . .

[Guest]

I, too, have a creative-minded child insofar as writing goes; I, too, have taught university-level writing courses. In fact, my background goes far enough into the past that I originally studied the teaching of writing under one of the people who first was putting together and pushing the whole idea of the invention-draft-revision process into the freshman comp classroom. The original idea was that students could benefit from a professionalized model or method of approaching the writing tasks they would be given during their college years.

 

What happened after that was this model gradually became co-opted and filtered down into lower and lower grades, and became applied to ALL writing. Now even kindergarten classrooms have some version of this: the "author" chair, writing workshops, what passes for peer review and commentary, revision. This was never the way the original program was meant to be used, and to my mind it is developmentally inappropriate to apply it to young children across the board.

 

What has gotten lost in the gradual take-over by this model includes the fact that different people write very differently -- some are social writers and love the chance to share their drafts with readers early on, get feedback, and revise. Others are hermits, never showing their work to another soul until it goes to the editor for publication. Some -- I think I remember reading that Frederick Forsythe worked like this -- think out their work in such great detail that they do just one draft; other writers like Rumer Godden talk about some novels being "given" to her, so that she felt that she was simply taking dictation, while others were a struggle and required dozens of revisions over a number of years; others routinely go through the five-step process. And it varies according to the purpose of the writing, its length, its complexity, and the writer's interest in the topic at hand. Not all writing is a process of discovery for the writer. To require that a child be enough invested in so many pieces of writing that she go through all the steps with each piece, even with most, strikes me as the kind of move that will inhibit and turn off a lot of children.

 

I am of the belief that kids should certainly be exposed to the five-step model, and be given the opportunity to practice it at various points from around third grade (the developmental stage when most psychologists think kids can begin to have a grasp of a true external audience). But they should also be exposed to other models and other ways that writers work, and given their chance to find out WHICH MODEL WORKS BEST FOR THEM or which best suits their purpose for any particular piece of work.

 

I also lean toward offering children options or variations for writing assignments. In the elementary school years, there is no reason why a creative child could not come up with suggestions for different ways to respond in writing to a given topic, in any subject. My daughter has written letters to authors, letters between characters, comic-strip versions of favorite chapters or novels, alternative endings, satires, versions of an event in the eyes of a different character than the narrator; she has also played around with having one character from a series of novels comment on the characters of a different series. There are similarly creative ways to approach history reading, science, and even math: a child could write a math alphabet book for a younger sibling along the lines of "G is For Google," write word problems featuring favorite objects or activities, etc.

 

This does not mean that a child never follows what I think of as The Method (the multi-step, draft-and-revision model). But it can be one of several strategies a child uses depending on the topic and purpose in front of her. If you have a creative child who likes to write, allowing her this variety and choice is a way to preserve that love while still developing conventional academic skills. There's a LOT of writing in the classical curriculum; there's room for exploration and delight if that's what your child gravitates toward.

[Michelle @ Living Waters]

Thanks for taking the time to respond to the above question - I was also very interested because most of my friends are using IEW, even for their young students (2nd, 3rd grade). While I've never used the program, I know my 4th grader would HATE the model, yet she loves to write.

 

I wonder if pushing that much structure on young students - the way they are doing more and more in schools - will ultimately stifle creativity and the ability to come up with original work?

[Guest]

I wonder if pushing that much structure on young students - the way they are doing more and more in schools - will ultimately stifle creativity and the ability to come up with original work?

 

I wonder, too. My area of concentration was 18th-century British writers, and I found it fascinating that the real innovation during that time came from people who did not have an elite education -- the kind based on continual translating back and forth from Greek and Latin, lots of grammar and rhetoric, etc. There was tremendous scientific innovation from people trained this way, which still strikes me as fascinating; but perhaps it was because their minds were not forced into a rigid scientific mold? The literary innovation, at any rate, came from middle-class men and from women, and they wrote outside the main elite genres and conventions; they basically invented the novel. Another real character, who evaded as much of his education as he could despite coming from the privileged ranks, invented the modern biography.

 

(This is by no means a theory about creativity, just a thought.)

[Karen in CO]

My writing instruction is currently very loose. It will become more structured as my dd matures. Right now we only do copy work, dictation and friendly letters for school writing. She writes a lot on her own outside of school, but that is different.

 

My ds was in public school until 7th grade and had managed to keep his wonderful, creative voice through many different writing teachers. By the time he was in middle school, his writing process was to write his paper or story, edit it to add errors that so that he could get points for finding and correcting them in class, then make an make an outline from both versions of the paper he wrote. He would then turn in his flawed outline and his flawed paper, get credit for "fixing" them and then turn in his "corrected" original versions. He had learned that to get a good grade, he needed to add mistakes. In college, his professors are sending other students to him for help with their papers. I've never taught writing, but I have learned a lot about how not to do it by watching my natural writer.

 

With my girls, I am working on the mechanics of writing while letting them develop their own voice and learn to find their own muse. In fourteen or so years, I should know whether or not this was a good plan. :D

[Lara in Colo]

WOW!!!

Thank You for your input. I feel better about following my instincts (second time I've said this today!) DD does do the edit, revision part its the following the steps sentence by sentence for the preplanned example that drives her nuts, she usually goes backwards to get the good grade. Then when the paper is graded, she aways get 95-100 pts when I know that she didn't THAT good. The paper we have to do this time (she's been putting if off for 4 weeks) is written, but she won't go backwards and so the format. I'm turning it in today anyway just to move on and get it out of my life.

 

Karen-Anne--What grammer & writing do you recommend for us, The WTM says with R&S no writing curr is needed, your input would be greatly appreciated.

 

Lara

[Guest]

Karen-Anne--What grammer & writing do you recommend for us, The WTM says with R&S no writing curr is needed, your input would be greatly appreciated.Lara

 

I have to admit we're renegades in the grammar department; I use no program, and I never have. This is partly because my daughter came verbally hard-wired, so to speak; grammar seemed to be built in (although spelling and handwriting were struggles for her early on). It's also partly because I prefer to do things suited to her interests. She has always been incredibly strong-willed, with passionate and definite interests, so that I've found it much more fun for both of us to work with her preferences and interests and do a lot of things presented as games rather than impose too much from the outside. This doesn't mean we don't do anything structured or that we avoid conventional essay-type writing; but it certainly does not form the core of what we do.

 

When she was younger we did a lot of MadLibs, including writing out own; we read Ruth Hellman's lovely picture books on parts of speech; and we did nearly all of the activities from Peggy Kaye's Games For Writing, some of which play around with making silly sentences in different ways. We read Lynn Truss's picture books about how punctuating sentences differently changes meaning; this tickled my daughter's fancy so much that she wrote examples of her own.

 

As she has gotten older (she's now nearly 14), I have found two books by Jeff Anderson, Everyday Editing and Mechanically Inclined, which I like a lot. One thing that has worked really well for us is finding sentences we like in current reading, analyzing the patterns informally -- one recent find was the two-word sentence -- and then looking for others like it over the next few days and keeping a running list of our finds. We also talk about when and how it is used (in the case of the two-word sentence: sparingly, for particular effect). Anderson, a teacher, has kids then use similar types of sentences in their next writing project, which is a good idea, I think, but one I haven't managed to work into our routine yet. But I really, really like the general approach of his books.

 

Because my daughter likes to write (actually, this is an understatement; she has so many ideas that her papers and things are all over the house, under beds and couches, on every surface), and because I feel fairly confident about where she needs to be by age 18 and can gauge her progress, I tend to be mostly hands-off regarding writing in general. I have taught her how to structure certain kinds of arguments, but she mainly experiments with imitating styles or structures she likes as a reader. She tends to not be drawn to formal essays, but to prefer narratives, whether fiction or non-fiction. So at the moment I'm letting her explore these as she wishes. She writes book reviews, makes up pretend copy for the inside front jacket of books, does movie reviews, comic strip versions of books, rewrites, satires, plays, song lyrics, etc. These different formats go in and out of favor.

 

Since she is not drawn to non-fiction, I will sporadically ask her to write summaries or lists of main points for me, or write down pros and cons or strengths and weaknesses of a particular article we read. One interesting idea I read about summarization that I've used numerous times with her: write a summary of a paragraph, then shrink that so it fits on an index card (no cheating with teeny tiny writing), then make a headline or alternative chapter title. This is great practice in precision thinking; my daughter also enjoyed it (we used colorful index cards and little post-its for the headlines or titles), or I wouldn't have pressed it on her more than once or twice.

 

Another strategy she's enjoyed: writing a summary or very short story or dialogue in one tone or genre, say journalistic news-style writing; then rewrite it as thriller, spy story, comic, letters, poem, etc. This does not have to be confined to "creative writing" or even literature; it can add fun to science and history summaries as well.

 

At the moment we're also on a quest for bad writing -- really bad writing. She adores finding badly punctuated sentences, grammatical and spelling errors in printed, public sources, or inflated rhetoric. I'm thinking of making a collection in a notebook.

 

If you prefer having a planned-out program or if your daughter needs to produce a particular amount of a certain kind of writing for institutional purposes, these kinds of ideas will obviously not work as your main curriculum for writing. But maybe some of them will work to cement what your daughter is learning in other formats.

 

Finally, I think it is important to remember that there are a lot of years, and a lot of opportunities for learning how to write using what I have called The Method, for writing conventional formal essays, in all subject areas. My primary concerns have been fluency, voice, and pleasure: learning that writing is a tool for thinking, but also for play and open-ended, nonformal, nonstructured experimentation. If I had a child who did not like to play so much with the written word, no doubt my take on all this would be very different. Everything I have done has been a response to my daughter's way of learning and thinking.

 

Hope this is of use in some way and not either overwhelming or babbling... I do both, unintentionally, when I get excited about a topic.

 

Edit: two recent discoveries are Signspotting, a series small books containing photos of hilarious mistakes on public signs, and Cake Wrecks, which has a section of spelling and other errors. NOTE: IMPORTANT! Preview and edit, because these are marketed for adults and there are sections of sexual innuendos etc. Most sections are innocuous and just very funny.

Edited March 20, 2010 by Guest