In Focus: Writing

Writing is an often overlooked component of literacy, but the ability to write clearly and communicate effectively is critical to students' classroom and workplace success. And writing assignments can provide a means to enhance students' vocabulary, comprehension, and spelling skills.

The Elements of Writing

It's a misconception that writing teachers simply tell students to write and wait to see what happens. Teachers should provide instruction in and exposure to various elements of writing to help students understand what good writing is. This article includes mini-lessons on audience, purpose, voice, word choice, and organization.

Giving Feedback on Student Writing

Responding to student writing can be time consuming and frustrating. Learn some productive ways to manage writing conferences within a workshop framework.

Help Students Generate Ideas Through Prewriting

Free-writing, brainstorming, imaging, and writer's notebooks are techniques to help students get the words flowing. Learn about these strategies and other planning mnemonics like RAFT, STOP, and DARE.

New! The AdLit.org Author Study Toolkit

An author study is a unit lesson that gives students the opportunity to delve deeply into an author's life and body of work. Whether individually, in small groups, or as a class, students can critically evaluate an author's themes, characters, and writing style; make connections between the author's life and work; and make personal connections between their own experiences and those of the author and his/her characters. Our Author Study Toolkit gives you all the information you need to create a successful author study unit with your students.

Featured Author: Deborah Heiligman

Deborah Heiligman's 2009 book Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith was nominated as a National Book Award Finalist. She loves the research process and says she is good at it because of her natural inquisitiveness (she calls it "being nosy"). In our exclusive interview, Heiligman talks about the writing process—developing ideas, researching, and revising… and more revising.

Booklist: Nonfiction for Teens

Some teens just aren't interested in reading novels, but do enjoy learning new facts, skills and even trivia from non-fiction titles, including biographies, histories, titles about sports or science, even how-to books.

Featured Strategy: Role, Audience, Format, Topic (RAFT)

RAFT is a writing strategy that helps students understand their role as a writer, the audience they will address, the varied formats for writing, and the topic they'll be writing about. By using this strategy, teachers encourage students to write creatively, to consider a topic from a different perspective, and to gain practice writing for different audiences.

Browse our Classroom Strategies Library for more techniques to improve students' vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing.

Community

Our Courts

Our Courts offers free civics resources to middle school teachers and students. Their Persuasive Writing Unit gives students the chance to examine evidence and develop arguments in the process of writing two persuasive essays.

Web English Teacher

Web English Teacher has a number of lesson plans and resources for teaching argument and persuasive writing. Units focus on thesis statements, voice, logical fallacies, research, and more.

Battle of the Kids' Books

School Library Journal's Battle of the Kids' Books gets underway March 15, with a new match-up every weekday for three weeks. Follow along as popular YA authors like M.T. Anderson, Christopher Paul Curtis, Candace Fleming, and Walter Dean Myers choose their favorites.

Featured Partner: Newspaper Association of America Foundation

Newspaper In Education Week is celebrated annually during the first full school week of March. For 2010, the NAA Foundation has created a teacher's guide, aligned with national learning standards, that provides an opportunity to teach critical thinking through five subjects important to students' success as adults—financial literacy, information technology, character education, nutrition, and the environment. Lessons can be taught individually or as a unit.

Glossary Term

Graphic Organizer: A text, diagram or other pictorial device that summarizes, organizes, and illustrates interrelationships among concepts in a text. Graphic organizers are often known as maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters.

Memorable Quote

"Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts."
— To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

"As a teacher of adolescent literacy for over 25 years, I always felt so alone in my quest for information. You have stepped up and are filling a huge void with much needed information that is accessible to practitioners.” — Karen Y.

AdLit.org helps teachers like Karen every day. Support our work by making a tax-deductible donation today.