The Writing Process

Collected notes:

• First and foremost, a writing teacher must write. That way we are more able understand how to help young writers.
• Writing requires patience for it to come together. Sometimes it can be very puzzling, or we discover a gap in our knowledge or some uncertainty about a topic, but that is how the act of writing helps us learn.
• If you lack experience, preprepared writing courses are helpful coupled along with plenty of practice. Work through as many as you wish with your students. 
• Improve or skip over trite topics.
• Set writing goals for students each semester. 
• Saved student writing helps to see progress made over time. 

THE WRITING PROCESS
 Rather than feeling overwhelmed by what may appear to children (or to anyone else) to be the daunting task of writing as a whole, one can work step by step with what's known as the "Writing Process". All writers use a writing process, whether consciously or unconsciously. The way presented here uses the acronym TOWER- Think, Outline, Write, Edit and Rewrite

THINK
This means finding a topic and thinking about what you want to say. Ideas are everywhere. Here's a few ways to find them:

• LISTEN carefully to the children when they speak about things that interest them. Many things they talk about can become good writing topics. Jot them down.
• Children can keep a daily journal or notebook to draw ideas from at any time for various compositions and letter writing.
• NOTEBOOKS AND JOURNALS increase personal awareness. In order to write in a journal, one begins watching to see what happens during the day, asking questions like, "What makes today different?" One becomes like a seer, observing life's daily events in a detached manner, noticing the ever changing scenes, characters and events which may generate the raw material for writing.
• Keeping a journal or notebook may be compared to breathing. Breathing in means collecting your notes and observations. Breathing out is turning them into a new creation.
• Ideally, one may fill up one journal or notebook a month. It helps to keep a generic list of journal prompts when the mind is blank. For example, What day is it? What is the weather like? What was unusual or new about today? Who did it involve?...
• Even the most ordinary things that happen in ordinary life can become interesting topics as one gains skill in their written expression.
• At first, young children can dictate their experiences to you to write down for them.
• Don’t throw any writing away. You never know what will come of it later.
• FREEWRITING allows students to freely write whatever they want for perhaps ten minutes, depending on age, to loosen ideas. Also "directed freewriting" can be done. Students freely write, but on a given topic or prompt. Directed freewriting also involves reading, watching or listening to something and then freely writing about it. This can be done daily to make children comfortable with writing.
• LITERATURE may be used for imitative writing as well as launch original ideas.
• WRITING PROMPTS Simply book titles or subjects from book catalogs and descriptions can prompt writing.  For example: Fun Science Experiments; Helping Mother; My Favorite Things; Jokes and Riddles; A Picture Dictionary; The Very Bad, No Good Day... 
• The Internet has many sites with student writing prompts.
• More prompts include a word or phrase; a statement; a question; the main idea of a paragraph; a quote or verse; a movie; a person, place or thing; an event; a photo or picture...
• MEMORIES Everything can be connected with a memory. Use an object or word to invoke a memory for a topic.
• BRAINSTORMING  Jot down everything that comes to mind, however crazy it may be. Later go back and see what would make a good topic.

OUTLINE

• Thinking should involve freely writing, exploring and messing around with ideas. Outlining involves organizing that raw material produced thus and putting it into a suitable order . One way is by asking questions like, “What is this about? What am I trying to say?” to help find a focus. "What point am I trying to make?” "What reasons do I have to support it?". For an advanced writer this can take much time. It has been compared to giving birth to a baby; the writing has to come out, and a successful writer continues to labor until it does..
• Besides deciding clearly what you are trying to say, further planning includes the purpose of the writing piece, choosing the form of composition to be used, how the topic will be developed, and so on. Many of these preliminaries will emerge and often change during actual writing and editing the first draft, so organizing and outlining are tentative.

WRITE
After some initial planning, it's a good time to write the first draft. Assure students they don't have to worry about proper grammar and other details at this time, just write.

EDIT

•  Don’t squash early writing attempts. Save criticism for the more experienced. 
• It is helpful to let a student read his work aloud to you first, so you can pay more attention to and appreciate the content rather than get hung up on grammatical errors and mechanics in the first draft.
• Always look for what was done well by the student, corrections can come later if needed.
• You may point out one or two errors for a student to learn from as they mature in writing. More than that may be overwhelming.
• Using a rubric with the six writing traits is very helpful to use both for teaching and editing. 
• If possible, put the writing away for awhile between each editing phase.
• Teach students to listen to their inner writing voice as they read what has been written. What is being prompted within to change?
• Check to see if the form is correct. For example, during essay writing there would be an introduction, the main body of the essay followed by a conclusion.
• Teach students a helpful way to correct spelling by reading the composition from the bottom up. If they even think a word looks wrong, they should double check it by consultation, dictionary or internet search.
• You do not require editing of every single piece of school writing. Require it more as they get older and meanwhile gives lots of unedited writing practice and free writes, with the exception of obvious things such as spelling. Since its important to get the correct form, simply draw a line through the misspelled word and write the correct spelling on the page for the child to imprint visually when he reads it once again. Similarly, write over small letters with a capital at the beginning of sentences. The bare basics are worth stressing so not to develop bad habits.
• You can save your own and your students' earlier, undeveloped, unedited pieces to improve upon. Utilize them while teaching brainstorming, outlining, editing, penmanship... the whole writing process.

REVISE
At the same time, do not neglect to take some time for revising and rewriting interesting papers. There's no better way to learn about editing and revision. Students can rewrite their final drafts for practice in handwriting as well.