Developing accomplished writers: Lessons from recent research 

We need to rethink our model of the writing process if we want students to become master writers. 

When I (Steve Benjamin) received my first college writing assignment — to compose a three-page paper analyzing key themes in The Great Gatsby and supporting my analysis with quotes from the book — I felt overwhelmed. In high school, we had never written anything longer than a paragraph or two. I could diagram sentences with the best of them, but what did I know about identifying a theme, offering my own interpretation, and backing it up with excerpts from the text? And then I remembered my Aunt Elaine, just three years older and a senior English major at the same college, and went to her for help. 

We sat together in the library, and she showed me how to identify a workable theme, draft an opening paragraph, and select a few quotes that would support my thinking. And then she said, “Write two pages by tomorrow night, and I’ll review your work and give you some feedback.”  

I replied, “But my paper isn’t due until —”  

She cut me off. “You’ve got to begin early so you will have lots of time to think and rewrite if you want to be a good writer, Steve.”  

She met with me on two or three more occasions, and we discussed and rewrote, cut, added, and polished. I got an A on that first paper. (Well, Elaine and I got an A.) I’ve forgotten most everything about The Great Gatsby, but, thanks to Aunt Elaine, I learned enduring skills and attitudes that made me a better writer.  

Of course, I was neither the first nor the last college student to be caught unprepared by a fairly simple writing assignment. When we (Michael Wagner and I) examine the state of writing instruction in K-12 education today, we are dismayed to see how few teachers provide the kind of scaffolding that Aunt Elaine offered. Some teachers may give students excellent prompts to get them started, make time for them to write in class, and even note a few comments in the margins of their first draft, before grading a required second draft. But these kinds of support are hardly sufficient. 

Writing problems — and solutions 

Generations of K-12 educators have described writing instruction as a high priority, and generations of critics have warned, as a memorable 1975 Newsweek headline put it, that “Johnny can’t write” (Sheils, 1975). And yet, generations of students have continued to perform poorly on writing assessments (ACT, 2018; National Center for Education Statistics, 2012) and have struggled to produce the kinds of writing expected of them in college and the workforce (Bernoff, 2016). Clearly, it has been easier to point out the problem than identify a solution.  

In recent years, however, the field of writing instruction has greatly strengthened its evidence base. Not only have researchers confirmed that the capacity to write well plays a key role in college and career readiness (Conley, 2003; National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2018), but they have identified a number of highly effective practices, such as allocating ample amounts of time for writing projects, guiding students through multiple cycles of drafting, reviewing feedback, and revising, and setting clear and high expectations for student work. Further, recent studies show that when writing instruction is integrated into science, social studies, mathematics, and other classes, students tend to deepen their learning — and become more proficient readers — in those subject areas (Graham & Hebert, 2010; Graham, Kiuhara, & MacKay, 2020). 

Broadly speaking, the research suggests that if K-12 educators truly want to help students improve their writing, they should treat them as, in effect, apprentices to the craft of advanced literacy. That’s not a new idea, of course. Apprenticeships have been widely implemented in career and technical education for decades (Curry, 2018), and the concept of “cognitive apprenticeships” has long circulated among experts in reading and mathematics instruction (Collins, Brown, & Holum, 1991; Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989; Schoenbach & Greenleaf, 2017). However, when it comes to writing instruction, few schools have followed through on the practices that an effective apprenticeship requires.  

In a cognitive apprenticeship, teachers model how to do a task, narrating their thinking at every step, and students repeat the process, explaining their actions as they go. Think, for example, of Elaine and Steve working side by side on Steve’s paper: Elaine showed Steve what she would do while writing, and then he followed along, adding his own ideas. If this sort of frequent practice, reflection, and coaching were the norm, students would have to spend much more time on their writing, be taught a much more intensive writing process, and work toward much higher expectations than we see in many classrooms. Further, they would need to have many more opportunities to write in multiple genres and in a range of subject areas. 

Time for practice and feedback 

Whatever the field, apprentices who strive to master their craft must be given adequate opportunity to practice. However, most students, in most schools, spend very little time writing (Gilbert & Graham, 2010). This is not a recent problem: In 2003, the National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges observed that, “Writing, always time-consuming for student and teacher, is today hard-pressed in the American classroom. Of the three ‘Rs,’ writing is clearly the most neglected” (p. 3). We’ve seen no signs that the situation has improved since then. For instance, the Institute of Education Sciences recommends 30-60 minutes of writing daily for elementary students (Graham et al., 2012), but few classrooms approach these optimal levels. Numerous times, teachers have told us something along the lines of, “I would love to teach writing more often, but I just can’t find the time in my day/week.”  

But as valuable as it would be to spend more time on writing instruction, that time must also be used well. Typically, instructional plans are “a mile wide and an inch deep”: Students encounter a myriad of writing prompts throughout the school year, with, at best, only one or two loops of feedback and limited revision for each prompt. It would be far more effective for apprentice writers to spend more time revising, reviewing the teacher’s feedback, and then revising again and again. Not only does such a cycle allow for the kind of formative assessment that has been linked to gains in student performance in multiple disciplines (Hattie, 2009), but researchers note that “revision is one of the key differences between expert and inexpert writers. Expert writers revise. Beginning and inexpert writers don’t revise much. Or at all” (McLeod, Hart-Davidson, & Grabill, n.d.).  

Whatever the field, apprentices who strive to master their craft must be given adequate opportunity to practice. However, most students, in most schools, spend very little time writing.

In most cases, feedback should come primarily from the teacher. While evidence suggests that it can be helpful for adolescents to provide feedback on their peers’ writing (Graham & Perin, 2007), teachers cannot necessarily rely on their students to play this role. National assessments show that between two-thirds and three-fourths of students are themselves unskilled writers, and they may not be able to provide instructive feedback beyond simple grammar, spelling, and other surface-level issues. Peers are likely to provide useful support only when they are accomplished writers themselves, and when they have been taught some strategies for giving helpful criticism (Price et al., 2016).  

However, teacher feedback should emphasize substantive comments and suggestions, rather than merely point out where the student has made errors or scrawl the occasional “Awk” or “Run-on sentence” in the margin. For the most part, students have no idea how to interpret such cursory comments or fix the errors that the teacher has highlighted. Feedback tends to be much more helpful when it poses important questions for students to consider, suggests how they might reorganize or expand on what they’ve written, and aims at “meeting students where they are as writers, with the end goal of driving substantive revision” (Hicks, 2017, p. 10).  

No doubt, some teachers will need professional development on how to provide effective feedback. When reviewing student writing, many teachers assume their main job is to catch errors in grammar and mechanics. Thus, they pay little attention to all sorts of other features — such as the amount of detail students include, their use of transitions, their use of repetitive or varying sentence structures, the way in which they quote and paraphrase evidence, and their use of descriptive language — that might help students become more compelling writers who are able to communicate more powerfully with readers. Sometimes, to be sure, students might benefit from comments about a grammatical mistake they’ve repeatedly made. By and large, however, it would be far more helpful to provide them with feedback that has to do with style, organization, the arguments they’ve made, or the responses they want to provoke in their readers.  

Often, in professional development that focuses on writing instruction, groups of teachers will review samples of student work and discuss what would be the most important feedback to provide the given writer. In doing so, those teachers who struggle with their own writing tend to learn, in a nonthreatening environment, how they can improve not only their students’ writing, but also their own.  

Of course, not every piece of writing should be the target of revision and further development, but students should be encouraged to engage in this process at least once a month (Schmoker, 2007). In the end, students and teachers must believe that working on their work, intensively, is more important than churning out dozens of lightly revised (if revised at all) pieces throughout the school year. In effect, writing instruction should shift from mass production to a small-batch approach, with the aim of creating fewer, better crafted pieces.  

A reimagined writing process 

The move toward multiple revision cycles for a single work reveals the problem with the writing process as currently taught in many schools. Posters displaying five- or six-step examples of this process can be found in almost every classroom that we enter. A quick online search reveals that, although there is variability, most visual depictions of the writing process show a series of distinct steps that begin with brainstorming or prewriting activities and then move on to outlining, developing the first draft, revising, and editing or polishing, and finally to publishing. The work is understood to move in a more or less linear and predictable fashion from start to finish.  

The writing process shouldn’t be viewed as rigid and linear; it can work in different ways for different people.

This model has remained the norm in K-12 classrooms even though experts have pointed out for decades that linear models of writing — those that separate the activities into discrete steps — may direct attention away from revision (see, for example, Sommers, 1980). And we know that revision is central to better writing results. As explained above, receiving feedback, thinking about that feedback, and revising represent the most powerful elements of any writing process model, and if employed properly within a master/apprenticeship framework, will result in dramatic growth in student writing ability and confidence. Unfortunately, however, this part of the model is largely underemphasized or overlooked entirely. In many classrooms we have observed, students produce new pieces of writing each day rather than building on and enhancing preexisting work.  

Because the existing writing process models fall short, we offer an orientation (Figure 1) that is more representative of how accomplished writing actually develops. This model suggests that a student may begin with any part of the process and move back and forth among the activities as needed. For example, one student might express an interest in voting rights and decide to gather information before beginning to write, but another student might choose to begin writing straightaway, drawing on extensive prior knowledge and experience before engaging in additional research. Yet another student might choose to edit and further develop an almost-forgotten poem that she has discovered in her writing journal, one that will require some expert advice from her teacher before she can overcome a stumbling block. In short, the writing process shouldn’t be viewed as rigid and linear; it can work in different ways for different people.  

No doubt, this reimagined writing process will require many teachers to let go of an approach that has been part of their classroom repertoire for years, perhaps decades, and that’s never easy to do. Further, teachers may also worry about the time and effort involved in requiring students to experience multiple cycles of feedback and revision. However, this recommendation does not necessarily imply additional work. If teachers assign fewer prompts each month, while allocating more time for feedback and revision on selected pieces of writing, then students will have more opportunities to think, communicate, revise, and improve their writing, without increasing anyone’s overall workload.   

Fewer writing prompts will also mean fewer completed writing projects and fewer grades, which may require school leaders and parents to rethink some expectations, as well, especially the assumption that a grade should be affixed to everything students produce. Rather, in an apprenticeship model, initial drafts and revisions must be treated as opportunities for teachers to conduct ungraded, formative assessment, perhaps showing students how their current draft measures up against a clear rubric. In fact, many researchers would argue that writing instruction is exceptionally well-suited to standards-based assessment, in which the teacher focuses (for most of the process of drafting and revising) on students’ progress toward specific goals, rather than constantly trying to figure out what letter grade they deserve. After all, what does a letter grade tell anyone about a writer’s capabilities and need for improvement? 

Expectations for master writers 

Students are less likely to become capable and confident writers in a culture of low expectations. Yet, low expectations for writing remain prevalent, especially in the primary grades, where many teachers hold narrow beliefs about the number of words or pages students can write, the vocabulary that they can employ, and the genres that are developmentally appropriate for them. Such assumptions often affect teachers’ choices about how much time to devote to writing, how much and what type of feedback to give students, and the kinds of writing they emphasize (usually an overemphasis on narrative and too little attention to argument).  

A number of times, while visiting classrooms, we have asked permission to work with kindergarten and 1st-grade students whose “completed” papers contained an illustration and just one or two sentences. When we asked about their illustrations, the children brought up many more ideas than they had included in their writing. For these students, it seemed, a picture was worth a thousand words. We encourage teachers to flip that rule and help develop in students the belief that a thousand words are worth a picture. 

For example, Daniella, a kindergartner, had written the sentence, “When I grow up, I want to live in a skyscraper” and had drawn and colored a lively picture, a cityscape with clouds, birds, an airplane, and a tall skyscraper. I (Steve Benjamin) complimented Daniella on her work and asked if she’d like me to help her to write a bit more. When she nodded in agreement, I asked, “Why do you want to live in a skyscraper?”  

She thought a bit and told me, “Because I want to live high in the sky with the clouds.”  

I said, “That’s lovely. Can we connect that thought with your first sentence?” Daniella looked at me, and I added, “Then, your sentence will say, ‘When I grow up, I want to live in a skyscraper, high in the sky with the clouds.’ ” She nodded and began to write, pausing once or twice to seek spelling help. I told her to write the words just as they sounded and that we’d fix the spelling later if need be.  

I continued asking Daniella questions about her writing and her thinking, and soon, she had transformed one sentence into five. She turned, smiling, to her teacher, and said, “Mrs. Walters! I just wrote a paragraph!”  

Mrs. Walters affirmed Daniella’s work and pointed to a chart on the wall and told me, “We’ve set an end-of-year goal that students will write four or five sentences about a topic — a paragraph. Daniella is the first to do so.”  

Supported by a teacher like Mrs. Walters who sets challenging goals for her students, who ensures plenty of writing time, who employs evidence-based instructional practices, and who provides her students with feedback about their writing, we are confident that Daniella will continue to develop as a strong writer. 

Writing across genres and disciplines

A reimagined writing program should also offer a better balance among genres. Although argument-based writing has grown in importance in recent years, teachers at the elementary level continue to overstress personal narrative writing: In our own work, we’ve observed that such writing makes up at least half to two-thirds of students’ written work. At the secondary level, even in many English language arts classrooms, students are not writing a great deal, and “the numbers are particularly low for assignments of three or more pages, the type of writing where students might be expected to engage with the discipline-specific arguments and evidence called for by the Common Core Standards” (Applebee & Langer, 2011, p. 15).  

Students should be engaging in more argument-based writing, and such work should begin early. In the earliest primary grades, as a precursor to argument writing, students should begin learning to argue with evidence through, for example, teacher read-alouds in which the class listens and discusses ideas together, using evidence from the text to answer questions and support claims. “Even children as young as preschool age can formulate arguments, giving reasons and considering counterarguments and rebuttals” (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017, p. 38).  

Opportunities to write should not be limited to English language arts lessons (Graham, Kiuhara, & MacKay, 2020). Including writing in other subject areas will naturally expand the genres in which students write, as they learn to write lab reports in the sciences and artist’s statements in art classes. Social studies classrooms are particularly fertile environments for writing and argument skill development. The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework from the National Council for the Social Studies (2013) acknowledges that social studies educators should demonstrate a “shared responsibility for literacy learning,” including writing (p. 7). The C3 Framework emphasizes the centrality of inquiry, questioning, evaluation, claims, evidence, communicating, and critiquing, all of which are crucial to argument writing.  

Of course, any effort to encourage more writing across the curriculum will require an investment in professional development. Many teachers outside of English language arts do not think of themselves as strong writers and have not received adequate instruction in how to help students become effective writers (Graham, Harris, & Hebert, 2011; Graham, Kiuhara, & MacKay, 2020). 

Writing for the real world 

Let’s stop pretending that scattershot, half-hearted, and formulaic efforts to teach writing will succeed. In reality, learning to write well is a complex skill that requires focused instruction and frequent practice. Rather than continuing to shortchange the teaching of writing in our schools — even as we bemoan the poor writing skills of our high school graduates — let’s provide teachers and school leaders with the resources and professional development they need, and let’s operate within a master/apprentice model that requires students to think about their writing, to seek helpful feedback that they can use right now, and to work on their work until students, like Daniella, experience the joy that arises when their personal writing power increases.   

References 

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Collins, A., Brown, J.S., & Newman, S.E. (1989). Cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching the crafts of reading, writing, and mathematics. In L.B. Resnick (Ed.), Knowing, learning, and instruction: Essays in honor of Robert Glaser (p. 453–494). Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 

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