All About Writing - Data Set
1. Those who teach a craft ought to do the craft. When teachers of writing write, particularly in the genres they teach, they develop insider knowledge. They know what makes sense in teaching writing. They know what doesn't. Teachers who write demonstrate to students someone who loves to think, explore and communicate through writing.
2. What’s important is that all students regardless of their linguistic backgrounds, need to be immersed in a rich and meaningful language learning environment, but not drills and learning rules out of context.
3. Underdeveloped literacy skills are the number one reason why students are retained, assigned to special education, given long-term remedial services, and why they fail to graduate from high school.
4. Adolescents entering the adult world in the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and conduct their personal lives.
5. Imagine … all students, regardless of socioeconomic circumstance, having spent most of their class time in English, social studies, and other courses closely and carefully reading, rereading, discussing and writing about ideas in various texts. Imagine every student graduating high school having analyzed and imitated excellent examples of adult writing.
6. Generous amounts of close, purposeful reading, rereading, writing and talking are the essence of authentic literacy. These simple activities are the foundation for a trained, powerful mind – and a promising future. They are the way up and out – of boredom, poverty, and intellectual inadequacy.
7. It is through reading, writing, and talking that students most directly and effectively acquire a facility with what Lisa Delpit calls the “dominant discourse”. It is the language of the educated, the language of the ruling and decision-making class. Those who master the language can influence others and are the least susceptible to being manipulated by those who wield language for unwholesome purposes.
8. Meaning is remarkably elusive... Writing enables us to find out what we know – and what we don’t know – about whatever we’re trying to learn. Putting an idea into written words is like defrosting the windshield: The idea, so vague out there in the murk, slowly begins to gather itself into a sensible shape… all of us know this moment of finding out what we really want to say by trying in writing to say it.
9. For all of our talk about the importance of higher-order thinking, we continue to overlook the fact that writing, linked to close reading, is the workshop of thought – with an almost miraculous effect on students’ critical capacities.
10. If we sincerely desire better schools, then our use of time must match our priorities. But as things stand, our findings have been replicated by virtually every other research team conducting classroom-based research – we are typically distressed by how time is so very inefficiently organized… we can readily locate another 30 to 60 minutes every day for reading and writing activity.
11. If students are to make knowledge their own, they must struggle with the details, wrestle with the facts, and rework raw information and dimly understood concepts into language they can communicate to someone else. In short, if students are to learn, they must write.
12. The very act of writing- and revising- teaches us to identify and correct contradictions, to refine and improve and clarify our thoughts – to think.
13. Reading, writing, and discussion – these three- are the foundation for a well-equipped mind: key to equity, access, and economic opportunity. They will mightily promote achievement gains even as they help to make schools a “thoughtful place” – a more relevant, interesting, and therefore educational place for our children to spend their precious school years.
14. The most essential features of good writing – such as “word choice”, or “voice” and their sub-elements- can be mastered only through repeated exposure to very focused lessons and practice opportunities that include the use of modeling and exemplars.
15. Eventually someone got the bright idea to do things the way they are done in the third grade, and writing across the curriculum was reborn into high school and college curricula as though it were something brand new. Students can write about history, about geology, about sociology, about economics, about physics, about – heaven help us – mathematics. Even more to the point, students can explore concepts, make connections, conceive ideas through writing if every piece of writing isn’t supposed to be formal, complete, and correct, a caricature of what is published in academic journals. Write to learn! Now, why hasn’t someone thought of that before?
16. Language is not just for expression and communication. Language is for discovery. Actually putting words on the page leads to meaning, connections, associations, ideas, and refinements of ideas. Language is our canoe up the wilderness river, our bush plane, our space capsule, our magic. Instead of “now you see it, now you don’t” using language works in reverse: “now you don’t see it, now you do.
17. An effective writing assignment does more than ask students to write about what they have read or experienced. It engages students in a series of cognitive processes, such as reflection, analysis, and synthesis, so that they are required to transform the information from the reading material in order to complete the writing assignment.
18. Teachers who write must pay attention to their craft. An interesting way to become a writing teacher who writes is to write your own assignments. You have become an colleague, not an A-U-T-H-O-R-I-T-Y. A lack of authority--surprise!--brings respect."
Because Writing Matters, National Writing Project, 2003.
Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice. Kylene Beers, Robert E. Probst, and Linda Rief. 2007
Results Now, Mike Schmoker.