On Writing

People often ask me how I improve the writing skills of the students in my classroom. The fact is it begins and ends with getting my teenagers to give an authentic effort toward their work. That’s the first rule. Get kids to try. Really try. It’s how I move a student’s writing from this:

To this, by the same student a few months later:

And I achieve these results with kids all the time in the space of about half an academic year.

How? Because I start with hammering home the things that are first and foremost not beyond the scope of their abilities.

In my class we begin with making sure all of the words we use are spelled correctly. Dictionaries are available everywhere in my room; all a kid needs to do is reach under the desk, crack open a dictionary, and start flipping through the pages.

Then, we make sure all paragraphs we write are indented. Now, even though my kids may have heard all of this before, I still explain in meticulous detail to my entire class how to properly use the tab function on a computer keyboard as well as determine the proper length an indentation should have on a lined sheet of notebook paper.

It’s a small lesson, one that takes but a few minutes. However, if I want my students to know it, then I’d better make sure I teach it to them. When you spend as much time remediating skills as I do, assumptions about prior knowledge are lesson killers. The fact is I just never know what my students know, what they don’t know, and what they claim to know but really don’t know. This is why I make sure to teach it all.

The capitalization of all letters that require being capitalized comes next. First letters of sentences, proper nouns versus common nouns, and, most critically, a complete and thorough explanation that students are never to use a lowercase i when the context requires an uppercase I to indicate the first person. Goodness, do I hammer this one home because nothing smacks of intellectual and academic laziness more to an English teacher than a kid writing, “When i go to the store. . . . ” (However, the lowercase i compounded with misspellings like wehn for when is often my earliest indication that I am working with English language learners and need to differentiate my writing instruction so that it meets their individual needs as I keep the rest of the class going forward at a more advanced pace.)

Then I remind my students of such basics as using a period at the end of all their sentences. Or a question mark. Or an explanation point, should the occasion call for such a thing.

I also ban words such as good, bad, really, and very so that writers push a little deeper to utilize a more vivid and rich vocabulary.

And, yes, I do all of this at the high school level despite the fact that almost all of the skills I just cited are things my kids most probably first learned in either third or fourth grade.

But like many, many teachers of teenagers today, I don’t see my kids applying these skills even though they have already learned them. And why?

The answer is not brains; it’s effort.

That’s my key to improving the literacy performance of kids who write with skills that test out at years below grade level. I get kids to buy in to the fact that they need to try. Really try.

When I ask my kids to put on big, bold display skills for me that (for the most part) they already have, I build their confidence and repair their oft-damaged writer’s self-esteem. Then I can focus on the positive in their work and shower them with praise in an area of their lives where many of them have known only shame and belittlement. Beginning in this manner shows my kids that they are not bottom-dwelling academic dummies doomed to forever be illiterate and inarticulate but rather students who already possess appreciable skills that are developing, growing, and, with a little bit of elbow grease, going to be lifelong tools they’ll possess, which no one will ever be able to take away from them.

For some of my teens, I am the first person in their lives who ever delivers this message to them. Quite naturally, it builds their pride, and once I tap this pride, and build the trust in my students that I am not simply going to red pen them to death by pointing out all their you-should-have-learned-that-years-ago mistakes, I become the beneficiary of positive momentum in my classroom. Once I even heard a wannabe boast, “Well, at least I ain’t illiterate.”

Of course, subject-verb agreement, the proper punctuation of appositive phrases, the logical organization of ideas within a paragraph, all these skills and many more come thereafter. But first, before my students can matriculate to this realm of academic accomplishment, they must give me a genuine effort toward being strong writers because without their own determination to succeed, I really have little chance of raising their performance levels.

No, it’s not the quantity of writing that my students do that helps them raise their skills by such leaps and bounds in my class; it’s the care and attention they give to details, to giving real effort, to taking responsibility for their own work and not loafing it through writing assignments just so they can get some credit for their work.

As famed business author Jim Collins (2001) once noted, “Good is the enemy of great.” It’s good—no, great—advice for the teaching of writing as well.

Not allowing students to accept mediocrity from themselves as writers is a key ingredient to raising their skills dramatically.