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What Students Should be Doing in Writer's Workshop

  • Sept. 23, 2017, 4:03 p.m.

A good writing program begins and ends with authentic writing tasks. Focusing on retrieval level grammar skills, without any connection to context, does not help students learn to make the decisions writers need to make.

What's the point of learning about nouns, verbs, capitalization, sentence structure, etc. if the knowledge and skill isn't embedded in decision making as we write? Writing to communicate a message is the life skill, not whether you can point to a common or proper noun.

Instead, let's work on the analysis level by asking "Would a specific noun (probably proper) be a better word choice? Will this noun help my audience understand my message better?"

We really need to think hard about what we ask students to spend time doing. Writers need to live in the process!