Teaching the Writing Process
Writers of any experience level can benefit from the writing process. It guides students from the topic to the finished product. Teaching the writing process is fairly straightforward, so it's the way students interact with the writing process that proves most beneficial.
In brief, the writing process includes 3 main phases: prewriting, drafting, revising/editing.
In order to use each phase to its full potential, students should become experts on each phase. Giving mini-assignments to groups of students helps them to focus on one phase at a time and to have instant feedback from members of the group.
Here's a lesson plan I've used frequently in teaching the writing process:
I. Activate background knowledge: Have students draw a visual representation to answer the following question. "
II. Present New Information: The writing process involves three phases. Each phase prepares you as the writer to reach a final draft. The phases build on each other and work together to clarify your idea about the assigned topic.
Phase 1: Prewriting
There are several activities we can choose from in the prewriting stage. During Prewriting we are creating or generating a lot of ideas about our topic. The most important part of Prewriting is to generate as many ideas as possible. These prewriting activities include brainstorming, clustering, mind-mapping, using wh-questions, freewriting, and compare/contrast charts. Then we need to organize the ideas. During the organizing stage we select which ideas are most relevant to our topic and most connected to each other. Which ones we like the most and want to write about.
III. Practice: Practice the prewriting activites and the organizing of ideas.
- Assign students to small groups.
- Give each group a topic and a specific prewriting activity.
- Students generate as many ideas as possible in 5-7 minutes.
- Students organize ideas (choosing which ones to keep and which to discard) in 5-10 minutes.
- Have each group present their prewriting activity and their organization of ideas to the class.
IV.Present New Information: Return to the writing process and move to Phase 2.
Phase 2: Drafting
During the Drafting phase students follow the organization they created in Phase 1 to express the ideas they generated from the Prewriting activity. Their ideas should support the topic assigned to them.
V. Practice: Practice drafting an essay or maybe just a paragraph (depending on time constraints) based on the prewriting practice they completed in a group. I find this activity is most quickly accomplished when students work individually so they can follow their own writing style and not try to mesh their style with other students' styles.
Since this is their first attempt in your class to draft soemthing following specific guidelines and the prewriting and organizing from Phase 1, this is the most important drafting for them to receive feedback on. Take the time to provide feedback relating to how well they incorporated their ideas and followed their organization from Phase 1. This practice isn't ver effective unless students receive this feedback.
VI. Present New Information: Once students have received feedback on their drafting practice, it's time for Phase 3.
Phase 3: Revising/Editing
In this phase students look at their papers with fresh eyes and focus on how well their paper reflects what they were thinking.
Revising
Focus on the organization of ideas; do they have a logical flow? And also focus on the support for the topic. Do the ideas they incorporated support the main topic? Is their support weak? Are any sentences irrelevant to the topic?
Editing
Focus on the grammar, spelling and punctuation. Here students are looking at the language itself and how well it reflects their ideas. I usually explain that this is the icing on the cake. When there are no mistakes in grammar, punctuation or spelling the reader will not think twice about the language of the paper. But if there are excessive mistakes in grammar, punctuation or spelling, the reader will notice and not want to finish reading, no matter how well organized or well supported the paper is.
VII. Practice: Practice Revising and Editing
Because it is most often easiest to revise and edit something that you did not write, I give students an example paragraph (or essay depending on writing experience) with specific errors in it. Students have the easiest time finding and fixing editing errors but they really need practice with revising.
This lesson plan is obviously very long and I often teach it over two or three class periods. I begin each subsequent class with a review (usually in the form of an unofficial pop quiz) about the writing process phase(s) already covered. This also gives me time to provide feedback on their drafting practice. I then sometimes use a student's drafting practice writing to practice revising and editing. I will usually add specific errors to it and remove the author's name when I use it for classroom practice. But it's nice to not write the whole thing from scratch. And it's often more authentic because it sounds like what they will write.
Teaching the writing process requires some time in the classroom, but in the end has huge payouts as seen in improved writing assignments that you will be much more excited to grade!