Reluctant Writer Ideas Needed

[1shortmomto4]

I need something, desperately, that will teach my oldest how to at least write a short paragraph, essay, for college courses at the CC level. He has struggled, struggled, struggled and I've been little help in this department. We've tried IEW but that just didn't work for him. He needs step by step, clear cut, follow the dots, video would be great, instruction. I know there is a class at the CC that he can take once I get him a little further along in writing but I've got to get him there.....

 

He has some dyslexic/dysgraphic issues which doesn't help matters.

 

ideas?

 

oh, and he's entering 12th but I'm not concerned about what the grade says on the label, but whether it can finally help him achieve some writing success.

[Carol in Cal.]

Have you done anything with dictation? Can he dictate a good paragraph if you write it down for him?

 

Can he do a good outline of a 5 paragraph essay? IOW, can he come up with the intro key point/thesis, the 3 supporting arguments, and a conclusion?

 

The reason I'm asking is that if we understood better the specifics of the problem, we could help more easily.

 

If he is pretty disorganized in the way he things about things, logic and reading a lot of examples of well-written opinion pieces might be the most helpful place to start.

 

If he has great ideas but doesn't organize them well, he might benefit from Jenson's Format Writing.

 

If he can dictate well but can't write, he could benefit from some sort of voice recognition software, plus copywork and dictation (yes, even at his age.)

 

You might want to look at the essay classes offered by Bravewriter as well. One is specifically for SAT/ACT essays, and the other is for expository essays. However, they don't really teach writing a good paragraph from scratch.

[LanaTron]

I was going to say Jensen's Format Writing, too. I'll be using that with my ds15 and dd14, who have had very little writing instruction up until now. We're going to do the paragraphing and intro to 5-paragraph essay parts in a 4-5 week intensive in August.

[MamaSheep]

I feel your pain. I thought ds would never write a decent paragraph, let alone a whole essay. And the idea of research papers made me tremble in fear. We have yet to attempt essays or research papers, but this past year he has actually started confidently cranking out perfectly acceptable paragraphs on a regular basis. (Hallelujah!) This coming year I'm going to be focusing on expanding that to essays. (Heaven help us.) But I think we've finally found an approach that clicks with him, which is the A, B, C approach in Pattern Based Writing: Quick and Easy Essay Writing.

 

It starts you out just writing what it calls "ABC" sentences. Basically it's a sentence on the given topic with a list of three sub-topics included. Like, "We went to the park and played on the slide, the swings, and the merry-go-round." The slide is A, the swings are B, and the merry-go-round is C. It does more handholding than this, but that's the general idea.

 

Then you learn to turn your ABC sentence into a "secret ABC" sentence. This is basically a sentence in which you know what your A, B, and C are, but you don't state them in the sentence. For example, "We went to the park and had a great time." The A, B, and C are kept "secret". And now you have a perfectly acceptable introductory/topic sentence for a paragraph, and you know what details you can include in the paragraph. But you practice writing these secret ABC sentences (which sounds a lot more fun and less intimidating than "introduction" or "topic sentence" IMO) for a while first.

 

THEN you begin writing paragraphs. You write an ABC sentence or a secret ABC sentence, and then you add a sentence about A, a sentence about B, and a sentence about C. Very structured. And it teaches you to write a "ROC-it" concluding sentence, in which you Repeat Or Connect to your original ABC sentence, or connect the ideas in this paragraph to the ideas in the next paragraph if you're writing more than one.

 

After you have paragraph writing down well (which is where we are at the moment--hoorah!) you learn to expand your ABC into an essay length by writing a paragraph each about A, B, and C. And there's information about writing an introductory paragraph and a conclusion as well, but you start off with just a one sentence introduction (an ABC or secret ABC) and a ROC-it sentence conclusion paragraph and expand from there.

 

It also does teach that you can have more, or fewer subtopics just by adding or subtracting "alphabet letters", and that you can have more than one sentence in a paragraph that talks about a particular point, and more than one paragraph on a topic in an essay, and that sort of thing. But it does start out very structured and connect-the-dots, as you say, and that has done amazing things for ds's writing and for his confidence. I heart it. I heart it a LOT.

 

I will say, though, that the actual teaching materials are not all that well organized and have some typos and grammatical errors. It's almost like borrowing a pre-publication rough draft. But the concepts are good, and the process has worked so well for ds (hooray!) that I find myself willing to forgive a multitude of minor errors, even though ds and I do sometimes roll our eyes about such errors appearing in materials intended to improve one's writing skills..lol.

 

Anyway, here's a link: http://patternbasedwriting.com/ (you'll find the web site is fairly dreadful too; don't let it scare you).

 

(P.S. I also get a LOT better results if I let him type instead of write, as he has some coordination and sensory issues that make him very resistent to handwriting anything. I still make him do it sometimes on the grounds that it's good for him, but for writing assignments where composition and content are the goal, I let him type.)