Writing

Many schools focus on quantity of writing, not quality of writing. Students are told to write but are not often taught the underlying process. To build up writing skills, you should start with stronger words through vocabulary and morphology, then stronger sentences, then stronger paragraphs, and then, finally, essays and short stories.

Good writing books that focus on building skills:

Sentence composing, focuses on writing a variety of sentence types.

Grammar composing, a sentence level writing book that teaches a bit of grammar while focusing on writing stronger sentences.

Writing Skills. A 3 book series that covers writing basics in an efficient manner, each book designed for different grade levels.

From Talking to Writing, covers all areas of writing, very detailed instruction, designed for struggling writers.

The sentence and grammar composing books can be ordered for elementary, middle school, and high school level. While they focus narrowly on sentences, a good sentence is the foundation of good writing and they are well designed and explicit. The Writing Skills books cover all areas of writing. They can be ordered from Rainbow Resource or Christian Book. Amazon sometimes has copies as well. The book From Talking to Writing is meant for students who struggle with writing but can be used for all students. Some steps can be skipped for students who do not struggle as much. 

For video based explicit writing lessons, a good resource is the Institute for Excellence in Writing, IEW. They have lessons for all grade levels. The lessons very formulaic, but they provide a good base which can later be expanded. They include all areas of writing, from the word to sentence to paragraph to essay level. They also have a very useful course for note taking that incorporates a bit of writing skills specific to the University level of writing.

Handwriting is also important. Don Potter has a handwriting page with a lot of great handwriting resources. Another good handwriting resource is the Iowa Reading Research Center’s LIFTER tool. It includes video instruction. While the videos are aimed at younger students, 40L volunteers have used the handwriting sheets with older remedial reading students who also needed handwriting instruction.

Adding explicit writing instruction will help improve writing skills. Ultimately, it equips students with the tools to express their ideas effectively, transforming writing from a nebulous task into a methodological process with a series of clear, understandable steps.