The Writing Process Transcript

Hello. My name is Susan C. Anthony and this transcript is of my workshop, "The Writing Process." The handouts for this workshop are available in portable document format on my web site: www.SusanCAnthony.com.

The purpose of this workshop is to: share ideas to help you feel more confident about your teaching of writing, gain a philosophical framework from which to view the teaching of writing, and go home with at least one or two ideas you can’t wait to try out with your kids.

My background

Before we begin, I should tell you a little about me. I grew up in the Colorado Rocky Mountains and attended a small school in a poor rural district. In elementary school, I always preferred math and reading to writing, because there was a "right answer" and I could be certain when I had it. Writing could be better or worse, but there was no absolute standard to which I could aspire. An eighth grade teacher turned that around by encouraging me and responding in depth to my writing. Now I write all the time. It’s second nature.

I got a degree in elementary education, moved to Alaska in 1979 and taught 10 years with the Anchorage School District. Most of the examples I’ll share in this workshop are from my classes. I don’t have children of my own, so my mission is to do what I can to help others educate and encourage their children.

Handouts

The handouts are for your reference. They’ll help you remember what I share today. The first page is an outline of the writing process and this session. The second page shows some options for helping your kids brainstorm ideas, as well as some things you can look for in their writing in order to make positive comments. In writing especially, you want to avoid negative comments as much as possible. If you can’t think of anything positive to say, refer to this list. You must find positive things to say about your kids’ writing. The last two pages were compiled at the request of homeschoolers and show average, above average and below average writing for each grade level. When you only have one or two kids, it’s hard to tell how they’re doing compared to other kids the same age. The only examples other parents might show you are excellent ones. You might be comforted to learn that your kids aren’t doing too bad for their age level.

Why writing doesn’t get taught effectively

Writing tends to be one subject that teachers avoid. For one thing, they aren’t sure how to teach it. When I started teaching, I made assignments, the kids wrote, and I graded their work. I wasn’t really teaching writing, but I didn’t know what else to do. Besides, that’s what my teachers did.

As I mentioned before, writing has unpredictable results. I far prefer teaching math or reading. Most standardized tests don’t test writing, so when teachers and parents feel pressure to bring up test scores, writing gets neglected. It is difficult to evaluate fairly and positively, and teachers often run into student resistance. Writing is work. As much as I do it, I can’t say I love to do it. It’s work. It takes time and thought and concentration.

Facts, Skills and Creativity

Teaching facts and skills is different that teaching "creativity." Different methods are required. To illustrate the difference, let’s take art.

• Facts include what colors mix to make other colors, what kinds of paints are available, etc.
• Skills include how to use your brush to make fluffy clouds, how to show perspective, how to do a watercolor wash
• Creativity depends on an individual’s talent, personality and individual ideas. You can’t exactly teach creativity, but you can foster it. Some, but not all, of the process is within your control.

Farming and fishing analogies

Writing is like farming or fishing. A farmer has control over part of the process but not all of it. A good farmer chooses the best seed, plants at the right time, fertilizes and irrigates correctly. But he can’t control the type of soil he has to work with and he especially can’t control the weather. A good farmer gets better results than a poor one, but there is no guarantee of success even for the best farmer.

Fishing is another example. I am not crazy about fishing for the same reason I prefer math to writing. Sometimes you catch fish, sometimes you don’t. We spend a lot of time out on Prince William Sound in our little boat in the summer. Sometimes there are so many fish jumping out of the water at once that we call them "popcorn fish". It’s tremendously frustrating to drag your lure through a school of fish like that and not get so much as a bite!

A good fisherman knows the best bait, the best times to fish, where the fish are most likely to be, and how to present the fly. But there may be no fish in the river. The best fishermen are persistent. They try everything until they get results. The more often your line is in the water, the better chance you have for success. It’s the same with writing. The more writing kids do, the better they get as a general rule. You may not see a lot of progress immediately, but you’ll often get a geometric growth curve and see great increases in interest and ability as time goes on.

As you teach writing, keep trying different ideas. Some will go well. Some will flop. Don’t blame yourself for the failures. Be persistent and don’t give up. Use every tiny success to encourage children. It’s a little easier for teachers than parents because teachers have several students. An idea may succeed with one child and flop with another. Sometimes that happens with whole classes. One year I had a great idea for a writing project for my 4th grade class. The kids loved it, we published and shared it with kids all over the country. The next year I tried the same idea and it flopped. You never can tell.

Left brain / Right brain, Creative / critical

Most of you are probably familiar with the fact that we have two sides to our brains. The left brain controls the right side of our body and is best at logical thinking, math, facts, and time-oriented activities. The right brain controls the left side of the body and is the creative side. Art, music, and creativity are right brain activities. Writing is creative, a right-brain activity. Spelling and language conventions are left brain activities.

I read the following quote several years ago about the relationship of the two types of thinking. It formed the foundation of my language arts program.

Creative thinking leads to the birth of new ideas, while critical thinking tests ideas for flaws and defects. Both are necessary, yet they are incompatible--creative thinking interferes with critical thinking and vice versa. To think creatively, we must let our thoughts run free. The more spontaneous the process, the more ideas will be born. . . . A steady stream of ideas furnishes the raw material. Then critical judgment selects and refines the best ideas. . . . Though we must engage in the two types of thinking separately, we need both.

Notice that creative thinking interferes with critical thinking and vice versa. Teach the critical aspects of writing—spelling, capitalization, punctuation, form—separately but concurrently with creative writing. Then be sure to tie them together. The goal is that it all becomes one holistic process, where the critical aspects are mastered and the mind is free to focus on ideas. Some of you are taking notes. My guess is that most of the words you’re writing are spelled correctly, not because anyone is ever going to look at it but because when you know how to spell a word, it’s easier to spell it right than wrong. It’s mastered, background information, second nature. That’s the goal.

In the meantime, don’t focus in on the spelling and other errors in your kids’ writing. Just note their mistakes in your mind and use them to guide what you teach in spelling and dictation. Focus on and respond to the ideas they’re expressing. Only when you see words spelled right should you point them out in the early stages of the writing process.

Writing Process

Early in my teaching career, I took a month-long summer training course on the writing process. Someone had decided that the best way to teach kids how to write would be to observe what real writers actually did. This is the process they observed (on the front page of your handout): Think of an idea, brainstorm about the idea, write a rough draft, read aloud and revise the draft, share the draft and revise, edit, prepare a final draft, and publish. Although different writers each have their own approach, these elements were common to all. One thing to remember is you don’t have to take every piece of writing all the way through this process. You can spend lots of time just brainstorming, or write a number of rough drafts on different topics and then choose the most interesting one to publish.

Idea Generation

John Dewey once said, "There is all the difference in the world between having something to say and having to say something." Calvin illustrates this: (Calvin and Hobbes cartoon on homework from Something Under the Bed is Drooling, p. 19.)

Rather than trying to think of an idea once an assignment is made, it’s easier and better to catch ideas when they happen. I buy a colorful engagement calendar each year and note inside what happened that day. I’ve been doing this since 1983! At the end of the year I go back through it and choose the most interesting things that happened, then write my Christmas letter. You might try that with your kids. No need to write in sentences, just make notes that remind you of ideas.

Another possibility would be to keep a spiral notebook. When your kids say something brilliant or when you have an insight or experience as a family, write it down. Note anything that interests you or the kids: things you’re learning about, things the kids read. Make journals of your travels. Use these lists and resources later as a source for writing ideas.

I collect real things and photos as sources of ideas as well. In my volcano box, I have volcanic ash, pumice, Apache tears, sulfur, and lava. I cut out great photos from National Geographics and filed them by topic, so I have photos of Mt. St. Helens, Kilauea, and other volcanoes. I also have photos of people, places, buildings, and so on.

There are books with lists of writing ideas. I have a list in Facts Plus. A book written especially for this purpose is If You’re Trying to Teach Kids How to Write, You’ve Gotta Have this Book. One mom said on days when she and her daughter couldn’t think of anything to write, she’d have her daughter close her eyes, open the book, point anywhere on the page, open her eyes, and write about that. Good writers learn that writing requires discipline. You can’t always wait for inspiration, although it’s great when you have it.

Brainstorming

After you have an idea, the next step is to brainstorm as much as you can about it. (Calvin and Hobbes cartoon on writing a report about bats, from Scientific Progress Goes "Boink", p. 24.)

Different writers have different ways to brainstorm and organize their ideas. You probably remember outlines and taking notes on index cards. I make long lists, then go through and look for patterns and pull out related ideas into new lists. I’m going to show you a couple of other options you should introduce to your kids. Tell them that every writer has a different method, so they should find something that works for them and stick with it.

With bubbling, you write your central idea in a circle in the middle of a piece of paper. Put all the related ideas you can think of in bubbles around it. Then go back through and look for patterns: what bats eat, for example. Circle all related ideas in the same color. This can be the basis for your outline.

Clustering starts the same as bubbling, but you think of the categories first, then connect specifics to the right categories as you go along.

Mapping is a sort of graphic outline. Again, you write the main idea in a circle in the middle, then topics on lines radiating out from the circle, subtopics on lines connected to the topic lines, etc. Go back through and number the topics and subtopics in the order you want to use. One boy I’d had in 6th grade came back from 7th grade and showed this to me, saying it had made writing so much easier for him.

Rough Draft

The next step is to write a rough draft. At this point, don’t worry about spelling, style, or mechanics, just get the writing going. Show kids some rough draft writing so they don’t expect to get it perfect the first time through! Try as hard as you can to get them to double space so they can make revisions and corrections without having to recopy. Also tell kids not to erase. Cross out what they don’t like. That way, they can revert to it later. If they’re not sure of a spelling, they should circle or mark the word, not stop to look it up. You want them to keep that train of thought rolling. (Calvin and Hobbes cartoon on writing a report about bats, from Scientific Progress Goes "Boink", p. 25.)

For most writers, the hardest part of writing is getting started. Poor writers edit out most thoughts and words before they reach the page. This used to bother me, but I finally learned that teaching writing is like fishing. Sometimes you catch a fish and sometimes you don’t. Here’s a poem one of my students wrote on Feb. 25, 1992. (Show overhead of paper with Tony’s name and date, that’s all.) The topic that day was "Silence" so perhaps he really did think about it, but in my early days of teaching, I’d have had to give this an "F." Now I just realize that I didn’t catch a fish. That topic didn’t inspire him. Maybe tomorrow’s topic will, who knows? I don’t give grades on writing because honest grades would be very discouraging and dishonest grades are the equivalent of lying to kids, telling they’re doing better than they really are. So I grade other things and just foster and encourage writing.

The topic the next day was color poems. Tony chose black and this was his rough draft:

Black is midnight black is an oclips black is when you turn your lights off and your mind is full of terrer black is a dungen you can’t get out of black is the grim reaper creeping behind you.

Wow! A fish! I called Tony up and told him how much I liked his poem. It has specific words, it gives the reader a picture in his mind, a feeling. I rewrote the poem with him in proper form using good spelling and punctuation, then had him recopy the revision for the final draft.

Black is midnight.
Black is an eclipse.
Black is when you turn the lights off
and your mind is full of terror.
Black is a dungeon
and you can’t get out.
Black is the grim reaper
creeping behind you.

That poem was selected for publication in a children’s poetry anthology, so Tony is now a published writer with his work in every library in the city of Anchorage. Do you think I’d have gotten this if I’d given Tony a hard time about not writing anything the previous day? Probably not. It’s critical to encourage children at every opportunity. They are very easily hurt and discouraged if you criticize their writing. Writing is close to the heart.

Read and Revise

The next step is to read your work aloud and revise it as needed. Revising means adding words, taking out words that aren’t needed, changing words to make your meaning more clear, rearranging words, and changing or combining sentences. It does not mean fixing spelling, capitalization or punctuation, although as adults we most often combine the two steps of writing and editing. There is no need to recopy unless a manuscript becomes unreadable.

Mark Twain once said, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."

Tell kids that the best writers revise the most. Dr. Seuss wrote 600 pages to get 20 final ones in And I Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Kids often interpret any suggestions as criticism and are very reluctant to change even one word. Once they’ve written their first draft, it’s done as far as they’re concerned. If you can get them to revise even one word, that’s progress.

Our first poem in 1992 was about Alaska. Most of what the kids turned in was terrible. Of course, I never tell them that. If I don’t think something is good, I’m noncommittal. I smile and say, "That’s nice" or "Good job." If I see something I like, however, I get really excited. "Wow, there are some great ideas in this poem. I never thought of it that way before. It made a picture in my mind. You used some wonderful, colorful words that made a powerful impression."

I did catch one fish that day, from Crystal. She wrote:

Alaska is nice Alaska is beautiful
When the Northern lights slither
through the dark black sky The
animals stop eating the babys stop
playing as they all start to run
through the cold green grass.

I called Crystal aside and told her I really liked her poem. Would she mind if I wrote it on the board so we could show the other kids a good poem? Maybe we could revise it a little, to show what revision means. She agreed. Just a side note. You have a much better chance of catching fish when you have several kids writing together. The success of one spurs on and encourages the others.

I asked the kids what they thought it was that I liked so much about Crystal’s poem. One thing, of course, was the word "slither." That’s a strong, colorful word!

I talked about what a cliché is, and said that most poets try to avoid words like "nice" and beautiful" not because they’re bad words, but because they’ve been used so much they’re kind of worn out. Crystal agreed that the poem might be better without those sentences.

Another change had to do with the fact that in Alaska, we don’t see northern lights in the summer when we have green grass. It’s light 24 hours a day! To solve this problem, she changed the last few words. Here is the final poem:

The Northern Lights slither
through the dark black sky.
The animals stop eating.
The babies stop playing.
As they all start to run
through the cold white snow.

From quantity often comes quality. David wrote six color poems about different colors. Most of them were not very good, so I was noncommittal. But one stood out. He had written:

Brown is like ceneomen
with its sowthing taste
as it goes down it tickels
your tong with its warmth
of choclot

Here is the revised and edited version:

Brown is like cinnamon
with its soothing taste.
It tickles your tongue
with its warmth.

The phrase "as it goes down" was not needed and changed the rhythm of the poem. The phrase "of chocolate" was a surprise because the theme was the taste of cinnamon. This final poem was selected for publication in an anthology.

Kim was very inspired by the topic of fog. She wrote on and on and on and on, pages and pages of ideas and phrases, most of which weren't very good. To revise, we went through and underlined the most colorful phrases and descriptive ideas. She rearranged these into a poem that is one of my all-time favorites:

Fog dances
in the untamed world.
She leaves soft footprints in the air.
Her wispy hairs cool down the sky.
She slithers past me on the ground
and wraps around the trees.

Notice the word "slithers". Same class. Once the kids knew I liked the word slither, everything slithered. One boy wrote that he had slithered down the stairs to breakfast! But it didn’t take long before they branched out and started using other colorful words.

Share

Step five is to share your work with someone else and revise. Don’t force kids to share with a whole group, invite them to. Applaud and tell them anything you like (nothing you don’t like). Later, when trust and confidence is strong, critical comments from others may be welcome, as they can vastly improve the quality of writing.

Teach kids how to encourage each other by modeling. At first, invite others to say what they like best. The writer can highlight or mark those parts. Then ask the writer if he would like to ask for assistance. If he had a hard time with a certain part, he can ask for ideas. When this process is working and kids are comfortable with it, invite others to ask questions if something is unclear. The writer can then go back and clarify. Once trust is strong, others can even make suggestions. Remember, though, that one thoughtless comment can cut to the heart and discourage a child from writing for a long time, if not forever.

Edit

The next step is editing, which is checking the correctness of spelling, punctuation, capitalization and form. Emphasizing these things before this stage can hurt. Remember, people don't think critically and creatively at the same time. As adults, we can switch back and forth pretty quickly. If you’re writing and you come to a word you can’t spell, you can switch sides of the brain, figure out the spelling, and return to your train of thought. Kids can’t do that yet.

At this point, kids might enter their story into the computer. I am still not able to do rough drafts and revisions using the computer. I think the only good way to do it would be to type in a draft, print it out with wide spacing, revise with a pencil, enter the revisions, print it out again and continue. What you don’t want to do is delete a phrase or idea you may want to recover later.

I have a whole other workshop on spelling and mechanics, so we won’t spend time on that here.

Final Draft

In the final draft, everything counts. Don’t let anything go out to a critical audience (sometimes including relatives) unless it’s perfect. You, your school, your child’s intelligence, the state of the world, and everything else will be judged if spelling is bad. This may not be fair, but it’s reality. It shows consideration for your reader to make your writing the best you can before you ask them to spend time reading it.

Publish

The last step is publishing. This doesn’t necessarily mean getting a book printed; it means sharing your writing with an audience. Sending a letter or posting something on the wall is publishing. Kids like special pretty paper. You can have them make a book. (At this point, I demonstrate how to make some great easy books. The source is Dinah Zike’s Big Book of Books.) It might be fun to take kids on a field trip to a printer to see how real books are printed and bound.

What motivates me to write is the publishing and sharing. I don’t really enjoy the process of writing. It’s a lot of work. But I have something to share. I visualize in my mind people like you reading what I’ve written and benefiting from it. I picture you enjoying teaching and your kids making progress and being excited about learning. That, for me, is a powerful, powerful motivator. It’s a dream I want to make come true.

Let’s seen what happened with Calvin’s report: (Calvin and Hobbes cartoon on writing a report about bats, from Scientific Progress Goes "Boink", p. 24.)

Later, in front of the class: (Calvin and Hobbes cartoon on writing a report about bats, from Scientific Progress Goes "Boink", p. 25.)

When you’re trying to decide what to have kids write, look for real situations, and especially real audiences. Here are some ideas that worked well for me.

Reflective journals or diaries. I met one girl I’d had in 6th grade several years later. She said she still had the journal she wrote in my class and could picture exactly what the room looked like, where everyone was sitting, etc. as she read it.

Pen pals. This gives kids a real audience. Write to homeschoolers in other states, grandparents, kids in other countries.

Family history. I wrote down my grandparents’ stories and made a book which I gave to everyone in the family at Christmas. When my Grandpa’s 90th birthday was coming up, I read his stories to the kids in my 6th grade class and had them write back to him, asking questions and telling him an adventure of their own. I took those letters down at Christmas and videotaped me reading the letters and Grandpa answering them and commenting on them. This kept him from having to write 24 letters and the kids felt the joy and excitement that can come from communicating in writing.

Christmas newspaper or newsletter. One year I did a Christmas newsletter. I used the daily engagement calendar I told you about for the source material. The front page story was about my car bashed to pieces by an unmanned vehicle, the sports page told the story of my first whitewater rafting adventure and catching my first salmon. I had an editorial on the state of public education in the U.S. and a page of classifieds (lost: weight, wanted: hugs).

Calendar. I made calendars with kids’ poetry and art, then gave them away for Christmas gifts. Sometimes, especially early on, it pays for you to take the rough draft, edit it, and publish it so it looks really nice. Once kids see something they’ve written in a format that makes them proud, they'll want to do more! If you produce a good calendar or other book, send a copy with a nice letter to the mayor or the governor, thanking them for all the work they do to make your city or state a nice place to be. Chances are good you’ll get a letter back, and something like that can make all the difference in the world to a child’s motivation to write!

Book reports. I loved book reports. I still have the ones I did in fourth grade. Try a variety of formats for them. Kids need to learn to summarize.

Reports. I used some of the pictures from National Geographic as starting points for reports. Kids were to choose a picture they liked (of elephants, perhaps), then look in 3-4 reference books to find the ten most interesting facts they could find, which they put in list form and mounted on construction paper beside the photo.

Learning logs. Whenever they learn something new, they can write it down with the directions in a learning log. This can be used for reference later on. For example: how to divide, how to set the table for dinner, etc. Help them brainstorm the steps after you’ve taught the skill.

Great Alaskan Adventure Book. This was one of my most successful ideas. We brainstormed as a class all the things we could think of that were unusual about living in Alaska, then the kids each wrote one of their own experiences or adventures. I typed the stories, laid them out, and had kids illustrate some of them where there was room. We made a table of contents and wrote an introduction. That year, we received a lot of mail from kids in other states who were participating in the "Great Mail Race." In that, kids from two classes write letters to other kids in each of the 50 states and see which class gets the most responses within a set period of time. We returned one of our books to every class that wrote to us and we got an amazing response! Some kids in Vermont sent us real maple syrup and a chunk of marble, along with 28 letters. A class in South Dakota was so excited they did a history book of their town and a video showing each of them guiding us through their school, introducing us to their librarian and principal, etc. The teacher said she’d hardly been able to get anything else done since the kids got going on that project, they were so excited about it. I have to read you a story one of my 4th graders wrote, James:

It was an innocent winter day. I asked my sisters, "Want to go sledding, anybody?" Rachael, my sister, said, "Sure." So we went out to sled in my grandmother’s backyard. I went down at almost the speed of light. My sister went a littler farther than me.

So we went, on and on. Suddenly, my sister yelled, "Watch out!!!" By the time she said that I was halfway down the hill. The reason she said watch out I didn’t know at that moment, but I did after that. I had slid right under a Mother Moose! The calf was behind her eating away. She didn’t see me at all! I’m glad for that. I was about four then and got freaked out after that. But I like moose.

Thank you notes. Have your kids write thank you notes whenever someone does something nice for them, and work to get people to write them thank you notes when they do something nice. It feels so great to get them. Kids need to know that they have the power to make people feel good.

Directory. I did a class directory. We took photos of each child and they wrote a few paragraphs about their interests or history. I compiled it into a book and printed it. We made a list of every adult in the school and a child was assigned to write a personal letter to each of them, thanking them for their work in helping kids learn. They delivered their letter and the directory personally. Teachers and others were so grateful! I encouraged them to write their response to the kids. Here is one example of an exchange between Jessica and Mrs. Cress, the itinerant art teacher:

Dear Mrs. Cress:
     My class wants to tell you how much we appreciate you teaching us about art. We also want you to know you are a very good drawer.
     Also that you make art class very interesting. I want you to know how much we enjoy your class. We want you to know you’re a great art teacher.
     This book that is attached is our Class Directory. We made it so you can get to know more about us. We hope you will enjoy it.
Sincerely, Jessica and Mrs. Anthony’s class

Dear Jessica and Mrs. Anthony’s class,
     I want to tell you how much I appreciate your letter and the directory of your class! You are definitely a very interesting group of people! I am honored to have received such a letter, and the opportunity to know each and every one of you better.
     Although I teach thousands of students, I very rarely receive any recognition in letter form. I plan to give a copy to my boss.
     I also don’t get the opportunity to get to know any of my students in any way other than art. This directory is an excellent way for me to know all of you better.
     When I return to your class, I will give you a short autobiography on myself, so that you will know something about me other than art, too.
Thank you very much, Mrs. Cress

One of the greatest rewards of doing this workshop is hearing back from people about how they used the ideas. One homeschool group in Minneapolis published a quarterly newsletter called "The Student Pen." Kids submitted their artwork, stories and poems, and a volunteer mom put it all together, published it and distributed it to all the families in the group.

Another Minnesota group published a cookbook. Kids wrote the directions for cooking their favorite recipes. It’s full of humor (for grown-ups).

A mom in Colorado said her son had really made a breakthrough. He decided to do a newspaper for the family. He wrote all the stories, duplicated them, collated them, and sold the paper for 50¢. I paid her 50¢ so I could have a copy to share with you!

Lots more could be said about teaching writing. This workshop mainly focuses on how to get kids started. Once their confidence improves and they get excited about writing, it’s a lot easier to teach them everything else they need to know.

Remember: Have kids write as often as possible without it being a dreaded chore. Write along with them whenever possible. Keep trying different ideas and remember that it may take awhile to get results. When kids do get excited about something, go with it. As much as possible, let them come up with the ideas.

My best wishes to you and your kids as you work on writing together. Let me know what works for you! If your kids write anything you think is really excellent, send it to me and I’ll write back!