Writing

A Variety of Writing Experiences

Although the writing process is the starting point for developing students' writing ability, teachers must recognize that students need a range of writing experiences to develop as writers. Moffett and Wagner (1983), Britton, Burgess, Martin, McLeod, and Rosen (1975), and others have noted that writing practice and instruction must occur in at least three modes--the expressive, transactional, and poetic. Students use the expressive mode to explore and explain their own thoughts and feelings informally; they use the transactional mode to report, inform, explain, and persuade; they use the poetic mode to create a literary work. Each has a place in a balanced writing program.

Traditionally, high school English courses have focused on the transactional and poetic modes to the exclusion of the expressive. Britton, Burgess, Martin, McLeod, and Rosen (1975) argue that the expressive mode is the base for the other two and, therefore, deserves a higher profile in secondary school classrooms.

Informal writing can easily be incorporated into language arts courses. Just as silent sustained reading (SSR) is a familiar practice in many classrooms, silent sustained writing (SSW) can be similarly incorporated. To this end, students can use the following:

• Response journals, which encourage them to reflect and respond to what they are reading, hearing, or viewing.
• Writers' notebooks, which encourage them to explore and record their ideas for subsequent compositions.
• Memorandums, which encourage students to respond personally to an issue. (E.g., "Write one page per week on an issue about which you feel strongly. Choose your format. This will not be graded except for effort. It must be original and will be responded to in one of two ways--either hand it in for written comments or share it with the class.")
• Fastwrites, which encourage students to increase their fluency through timed writings on a given topic.
• Dialogue journals, which encourage students to interact with teachers as both make written responses to each other's entries.
• Learning logs, which encourage students to reflect on what they have learned in any subject area. Logs explore questions such as the following: What did you learn today? What confused you? What questions do you still have? What was the point of the lesson?

In many instances, informal writing need not necessarily be assessed. Depending upon purposes, however, informal writing in journals or logs can be assessed and evaluated. For example, the following three-point holistic scale can be used:

0 = no entry attempted
1 = a limited entry attempted; incomplete or unclear
2 = a clear, complete, and thoughtful entry.

Whatever form of assessment or evaluation is used, teachers need to set expectations. Mechanical errors will not be the focus of the teacher's responses but recurrent technical weaknesses will be noted for diagnostic purposes and future teaching. Each journal or log entry should be dated and labelled. The journal or log should be accessible to the student. The time when students write in their journal or log may vary--at the beginning of a lesson, during a lesson, for closure, once a week, twice a week, three times a week.

As students work with the various modes--expressive, transactional, and poetic--they gain experience with the types of writing that are outlined in the learning objectives and that are carried out in daily living.