Writing needs to be taught and practised as a process that involves the following stages:
- PURPOSE AND AUDIENCE (students need to articulate why they are writing and who will be reading the writing
- PLANNING (notes/knowledge organised ready to write; graphic organisers are effective here as they make the content and structure visible and easy for the teacher to give feedback)
- DRAFTING (constructing notes into full sentences using appropriate sentence starters – see theHow to Write What You Want to Say Series)
- EDITING (making any structural changes to the writing; may include improving sentence beginnings and structure, and vocabulary use. NB: Well-planned writing requires little in the way of major structural changes as these would have been identified in the planning phase and the necessary changes made before drafting.)
- PROOFREADING(spelling, grammar and punctuation corrections that ensure the writing is technically correct)
- PUBLISHING(production of the final copy of the writing)
NB: Poorly structured writing that lacks sound topic knowledge or an understanding of purpose and audience and is poorly organised is almost impossible to ‘fix-up’ at the draft stage. However, teachers spend a great deal of their time trying to do this. They often can do little more than correct technical errors (spelling, grammar and punctuation) at the draft stage, potentially creating technically correct, but still very poor writing.
Teaching writing as a process:
- reduces cognitive load and leads to better writing, subject understanding and expression
- enables a focus on purposeful, quality writing rather than just completion and compliance of a written piece
- Every time students write they should be using several stages of the writing process.
