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Better Approaches to Teach Writing

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Writing, a skill that’s pivotal to how we communicate and think critically is important and needs to be explored more. In order to spread the importance of writing, Patricia A. Dunn points on the bad idea of ‘Teaching Grammar Improves Writing’ and discusses why this idea does not improve writing and therefore not a good practice in teaching how to write. Writing does not just involve the use of phrases and clauses and is rather more complex than that. Writers should be able to get instructions that enables them to become better informed writers. Luckily, there are a number of approaches that have been studied over the years that help writers succeed in writing, including George Hillocks who has reviewed over 2000 studies on teaching writing, and aims to shed light on it in his article of ‘Synthesis of Research on Teaching Writing.’

 Teaching students to become effective writers. Quigley, Alex. “The Confident Teacher.” The Confident Teacher, 29 Apr. 2017, www.theconfidentteacher.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/myhc_16815.jpg.

In his article, Hillocks gives three examples of instructional focuses that should be used when teaching writing. Sentence Combining is one of them; and it includes the use of syntactic structures to form proper sentences and is a powerful method for students writing to improve. Sentence combining help students arrange words and phrases to form meaningful sentences. Teachers are encouraged to adapt this method because it provides students with control over an organized range of syntactic structures that they can pick and choose from as they write. Syntactic fluency increases with age and classroom instructions needs to implement this method deeper and deeper as students move from lower to higher grades. A number of researchers conclude that direct instruction in sentence combining results not only in greater syntactic complexity, but in increased quality (O’Hare 1973, Faigley 1979, Morenberg Et al, 1978)

After learning how to form clear sensible sentences, writers can be introduced to the second type of instruction known as ‘scales’ What this means is that teachers allow students to revise and judge compositions based on a scale that they provide. By evaluating different compositions over a period of time, students are able to grasp important skill sets needed by their own and thereby improve their writing. As Hillocks states, “The use of scales and criteria guided revision papers appears to help students develop a better control over and understanding of discourse knowledge.” This is important because students in such practices improve a lot of aspects needed in writing such as, composing, selection of content and development of plans.

As students are exposed to multiple writings that are different in nature, it helps them build their own agenda of how to write papers, and this in turn helps prepare writers to a higher-level lesson in ‘inquiry’ which is the third method of teaching writing and is an instructional focus that concentrates on a writer’s ability of understanding and expanding on a particular idea. In other words, teachers present writers with data or scenarios and they learn strategies that will help them present that particular data in their writing. These strategies include, recording and describing, presenting evidence, discriminating and hypothesizing (Hillocks, pg.80) This method of ‘inquiry’ dramatically improves students writing because it increases the writers’ comprehension and ability to transcribe information in a fashioned way. Just like in elementary school when teachers used to assign us work involving drawings and the task was to explain ‘what’s happening in the picture?’ Inquiry works the same way, and it helps writers use strategies to expand on tasks. Hillocks states “The process of observing and writing is so much effective in helping students writing improve.”( Hillocks, pg.80) When teachers adapt the instructional focus of ‘inquiry’ they help writers learn strategies for transforming raw data and use it in their writing, which in turn affect writers’ plans and help their writing improve. 

The light of Writing. Duncan, Apryl. “5 Fun Ways to Make Handwriting Stress-Free for Your Child.” Verywell Family, 26 Sept. 2020, www.verywellfamily.com/teach-your-child-to-write-name-3128914.

In a world where writing is so dependable, students need to be prepared well enough to be ready just enough for it; and teaching grammar alone does not do the justice of creating writers. Pushing writers in the right direction requires a type of instruction that will benefit them in writing. In order achieve this, practices such as ‘sentences combining’ help students understand how different sentences can be formed together by the use of syntactical structures, therefore increasing their quality in writing; While the use of ‘scales’ effectively raises writers’ confidence and judgement in their own writing by simply revising and rating other compositions. Additionally, when teachers present writers with data that they will need to break down, examine and interpret it into their papers, it effectively turns them into good writers. As Hillocks states that, once curriculums begin to focus on the three instructional focuses, they will begin to produce more effective writers (Hillocks, May 1987.)

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