Troubleshooting+the+Writing+Process

=Attitude= Writing is fundamentally a meaning making process. When we reject student writing, it feels to them as if we are rejecting them. So the most constructive attitude we can have is to think of ourselves as advocates for students. As advocates, we are doing everything we can to help the student be able to use writing for his or her own purposes. The ability to write well opens doors, particularly with the instant publication of the internet. The ability to write well allows us to have influence on the ideas of other people. Our job as teachers is to open the writing door for our students. In this vein, our assumption should be that everyone is capable of using writing as a means of communicating.

Along with being sure that students are capable of learning, we should realize that we are capable of figuring out the problem and teaching. After all, many of us are not professional writers, but all of us have used writing for many different purposes. We have been through all sorts of writing processes. Most importantly, we have struggled with writing in one way or maybe a lot of ways. Remembering our struggles helps us to teach.

=Damage Control Plan= Back in the 1960s there was a novel called Up the Down Staircase. It took place in an urban school where many of the teachers were burned out, and the story is told via the memos and letters a new teacher gets in her mailbox. Anyway, the central event in the book was the suicide of a student. It turns out she had written a love letter to her English teacher and his response was to pull out the red pen and correct it. He didn't have a damage control plan.

=Get the Symptoms= One advantage to having kids write in the classroom instead of at home is that you can really see how they approach the entire writing process. This allows you to get the symptoms of the struggle for the writer. For example, some people struggle at the level of getting an idea. Some people struggle with perfectionism. Some people have such a hard time with the physical demands of writing that they can't even begin to think of meaning making.

In the interest of thinking through symptoms, the following are some case studies of writers I know and/or have helped.

J. has dyslexia and has had it all his life. Although he is engaging and interesting, clearly smart, when he talks, his writing is minimal. His spelling is atrocious, as is his handwriting. He does not write very much. The problem here is that the actual process of dealing with the physical demands of writing are getting in the way of J. expressing his ideas. The solution in this case is a software program called Dragon Speaking Naturally. With this program, he can dictate a text to the computer and then he can edit that text.

G. considers herself a writer but she has a hard time sitting down and actually writing. Her symptoms: always an excuse instead of a piece of writing, perfectionism, and a resulting frustration with herself. The solution here is to ask G. to write one page a day of just anything, even garbage. The result in real life was that she wrote every single day for a month and on many days she wrote more than just a page a day.

M. is working on a dissertation, but she is in deep trouble with her dissertation committee because of her writing problems; she could fail over this. Her writing about her research project meanders and is not well-organized. The solution here is twofold: help M. understand the nature of her task and help her put signposts for readers in her text. The nature of the task: the problem with a dissertation is that it is a multi-faceted, complex project that has to be translated into a single, linear text. I use the analogy of a forest. The research project is a forest and the dissertation is the trail through the forest that allows the reader to understand the features and nature of the forest. Thinking in these terms allows M. an opportunity to back up from her research project to think about the needs of the reader for an organized approach. Secondly, we inserted statements that told the reader what to anticipate in chapters and sections. She passed.

J. is petrified of messing up. He has had negative experiences with writing because he is not a good speller and not strong in grammar. At the same time, he is a very creative person. But when he is asked to write, he reaches a block quickly because he is so fearful. The solution here is to invite J. to write in the worst way possible--to try to mess up and to break the rules of writing. This helps in a two-fold way. First of all, it rids him of his fear because he is supposed to mess up. Secondly, it is fun and makes writing a more desirable thing to do.

C. writes research papers, but her writing is frequently muddled. She does things in a very intuitive way but has a hard time articulating what she is doing, which makes it hard for her to write clearly. She also has a hard time with systematic, logical thought. The solution is to work on even verbal articulation of her ideas and also to work on forms of logical thought. Feedback in the form of questions which ask her to fill in the intuitive leaps helps here.

R.'s writing is very ordinary--she does not seem to find original thoughts to engage with. She is into conformity with her peers and afraid to get too far away from what the other students are doing. The solution here was to encourage freewriting and then to show her how the crazy ideas at the end of her freewriting have the most value. In this case, the ideas were like a metaphysical poem (yoking together of two disparate ideas) and she drafted a metaphysical poem based on the interesting ideas she had come up with, after this concept was explained to her.

S. loves to write and she writes all the time. She writes e-mails, diaries, and long accounts of her life. The problem is that her narratives ramble instead of telling a story one event at a time.

The struggles above represent different aspects of the writing process and are far more significant than struggles with grammar or spelling. If the only problem is grammar or spelling, then the student needs to learn how to edit by editing other people's writing.

=Reproduce the Problem= You are more likely to do this when the writing process takes place in front of you. This is why it is important to have students write in class. If there are issues of structure and organization, when you intervene during the process, they tend to be grateful. When they feel a piece is "done" because they are handing it in to you, then whatever feedback you give is likely not going to be used because the feedback was given too late in the writing process.

We want students to be able to write on their own at home, but sending them home with a writing assignment without some in-class scaffolding of the writing process is likely to be a setup for failure. The other problem can be the "helpful" parent. When students write in class, you can be assured that you are seeing what they are doing, not what their parents can do. Also, if they are writing with pencil and paper in a classroom and have no access to computers, they have a really tough time copying and pasting other people's texts.

=Do the Appropriate Corrective Maintenance= One item under here is for students to understand the writing process. During drafting, students should not be worrying about wording, spelling, or grammar, particularly if the ideas they are working on are difficult to articulate. Instead, they should be focusing on getting a text down on the page so the ideas are visible. Only when ideas are visible can they be edited, reworded, reorganized, etc. So, the first goal is getting something on the page, even if it is bad. I would say that a lot of people struggle with writing because they focus on the end process (surface level editing issues) instead of meaning. Meaning first. Then editing. I tell people to write it badly--it's their job to get the ideas on paper and my job to make them beautiful. The same thing applies in class--students need to get their ideas on the page before crafting their writing.

=Narrow It Down to the Root Cause= Is the problem at the level of ideas? Organization? Articulation? Word use? Grammar? Spelling? Getting started? Keeping going? Finishing?

=Repair= A writer may have several issues going on, but when you are troubleshooting the process, choose the most significant issue to work with first. In other words, if a student struggles to get anything on the page and whatever he gets on the page has a lot of mistakes in it, the first thing to work on is getting words on the page. Consider that the physical process of writing (by hand or typing) is the least important aspect of writing. The most important is meaning making and honing that meaning. So, have the student dictate the text (Dragon Speaking Naturally) and work on pulling ideas out of the student's brain and into language. Later you can work on surface features. Meaning first. Editing last.

Another frequent problem is with organization. It can be helpful to take a text and cut out its paragraphs and/or sentences (depending on length) and then play with those little pieces of paper. Being able to reorganize a text is an abstract task. If you make it concrete, it will become more possible for students to do.

=Test= Did it work?

=Take Pride= If you are helping students to improve their ability to communicate using the written word, you are empowering them for the rest of their lives to be able to have influence. This is an important aspect of teaching and yet it is also an art, to be able to help students in an encouraging way. If your students are getting better at writing, you are doing something major. Pat yourself on the back.

=Prevent Future Occurrences of the Problem=

One of the biggest sources of writer's block is perfectionism. Yet this can be prevented if we really understand the writing process and don't focus on surface features at the expense of meaning. When people have fear, they have a difficult time expressing themselves, particularly in a semi-permanent way. When we speak, our words disappear. When we write, they are potentially there forever and that is intimidating. Written words can be used against the author. These are the fears we have just as a natural part of writing. Add to that the fear of doing something wrong on the first draft and you have the perfect recipe for teaching a student how not to write.