Evidence-based recommendations for teaching writing

Original article: LINK

By Steve Graham, Alyson A. Collins & Stephen Ciullo

In this paper, Steve Graham and his colleagues identify 11 effective methods for teaching writing based on nearly a 1,000 studies. These methods apply to both younger and older students (aged 5–18). Here are their key points:

Students need to practise writing regularly, but just writing a lot isn’t enough.
Students should receive guidance and support while writing (LINK).
Basic writing skills like handwriting (LINK), spelling (LINK), grammar (LINK), and sentence structure (LINK) must be taught.
Teaching students how to plan (LINK), revise (LINK), and edit (LINK) their compositions improves their writing.
Encouraging critical thinking and the use of vivid imagery can make pupils’ writing better (LINK).
Increase students’ knowledge about writing techniques and concepts (LINK).
Incorporate modern writing tools and technology in the classroom.
Have students write about their learning in wider-curriculum subjects (LINK and LINK)
Encourage children to read as writers in writing lessons (LINK) and to write about their reading in reading lessons (LINK and LINK).
Teach students how to write summaries in reading lessons and in the wider curriculum (LINK).
Create an environment that motivates students to write (LINK).

Writing’s importance is undeniable. It touches every part of children’s present and future lives. For example:

Academic success. Rightly or wrongly, writing is by far the most popular way of assessing students’ knowledge. Therefore, students’ access to qualifications rests heavily on their ability to write well.
Economic success. Most employees need to be able to write to perform their jobs, and people’s writing skills are routinely assessed by employers when making decisions about hiring new staff. Writing is also great currency. For the 15% of self-employed people in the UK, an ability to produce writing is essential to the success of their businesses.
Social inclusion. Writing allows us to stay connected with loved ones and to participate in online discourse (including social media) with confidence.
Civic and political participation. Writing allows us to persuade others, share theories, give our opinion, and bring about change.
As an art form. Writing allows people to create imaginary worlds, entertain others and to paint with words.
Personal well-being. Writing allows us to record the things we don’t want to forget, express our feelings, share who we are, share what we know, better understand ourselves, and potentially heal emotional wounds.

Children who fail to master writing miss out on many aspects of being a fully-fledged member of our society and find themselves at a severe disadvantage. Poor writing skills limit children’s academic, occupational, cultural, civic and personal ambitions.

Unfortunately, many teachers in the UK feel they don’t know enough about how to teach writing effectively (LINK).

For pupils to feel the full benefits from writing, teachers need effective teaching tools. One good way to find these tools is by looking at research on teaching writing. This is what Graham and his colleagues did in their article. They reviewed six meta-analyses and one meta-synthesis to make evidence-based recommendations for the teaching of writing.

Before presenting their 11 evidence-based recommendations in more detail, it would be good to explain the meta-analyses and meta-syntheses they used. A meta-analysis is a way of systematically reviewing and summarising the results of different studies that investigate the same question using similar methods. Meta-analysis converts the results of each study into a common metric, allowing them to be compared and combined. In each study, an ‘effect size’ is calculated to measure the impact of the writing treatment.

A positive effect size indicates that the teaching practice had a more positive effect than the control group. An ES of 0.25 is considered small, 0.50 medium, and 0.80 large. However, these numbers are often only a broad indicator and are best seen as increasing your chances of success.

Unlike meta-analyses, which focus on quantitative data, a meta-synthesis looks at qualitative studies. This involves analysing the writing practices of exceptional writing teachers. Researchers read each study, record the practices used by these teachers, and identify common themes. We conducted something similar ourselves in 2019. If a theme was found in most studies, it can be considered a common practice among the best performing writing teachers.

Recommendation 1: Students need to practise writing regularly, but just writing a lot isn’t enough

When teaching children to write, the goal is for them to use writing effectively to meet their own writerly needs. For instance, by completing class writing projects, children learn about their readers’ expectations, the writer’s discipline, and what makes for a successful and meaningful piece of writing in different genres. They also discover which craft moves work best when. Students can learn important things about writing by writing frequently. They can also develop their writing fluency [LINK].

Children also learn a lot about writing by writing for meaningful purposes and for real audiences. Ensuring students write for genuine reasons can help them become better writers [LINK].

However, just increasing the amount of writing children do is not enough to significantly improve their writing skills. What makes the difference is explicit instruction. For example, directly modelling to students strategies for planning [LINK], drafting [LINK], and revising [LINK] helps them apply these same techniques to their own writing.

Recommendation 2: Support students as they write

Undertaking a writing project involves five key steps: thinking about the project and establishing a publishing goal [LINK], generating ideas [LINK], turning ideas into sentences [LINK and LINK], transcribing those ideas onto paper [LINK], and making changes (revisions LINK and edits LINK). While not every writing project uses all these steps, helping children with them can improve their writing outcomes.

One way to support students is to plan your writing units effectively [LINK]. This involves a routine of establishing a publishing goal, reading as writers [LINK] planning, drafting, revising, editing and publishing and performing. Students write for real audiences and purposes and support each other with daily feedback [LINK]. Teachers provide mini-lessons based on what children need instruction in most [LINK]. These approaches have been shown to significantly improve the writing skills for children and teenagers.

Effective support strategies

Goal-Setting: Teachers and students should set specific product goals for a class writing project [LINK].
Teach idea generation and planning strategies: These help students gather and organise their writing ideas through discussion, reading, brainstorming, drawing, and using graphic organisers [LINK and LINK]. Pre-writing activities like these lead to significant improvements in children’s writing.
Peer feedback: Students work together when generating ideas, planning, drafting, revising and proof-reading their writing. Peer assistance leads to small improvements for younger children and moderate improvements for older pupils [LINK].
Teacher feedback: Verbal feedback, written marking and group evaluation based on class-generated success criteria all help improve students’ writing [LINK & LINK].

Recommendation 3: Teach basic writing skills

To write well, students need to learn how to turn their ideas into sentences that others will understand. This involves choosing the right sentence structure, picking the right words, and using the conventions their readers will expect. Crafting sentences should become an easy task for students [LINK].

Teaching grammar functionally and teaching at the sentence level.

Sentence level instruction: Explicitly teaching students how to craft sentences improves their writing. For example, modelling specific sentence types before inviting children to use them for themselves that day is effective [LINK].
Vocabulary: While vocabulary instruction has positive effects, its impact on writing is not significant enough to be considered better than no instruction. With that said, our schools are having great success attending to vocabulary use at the editing stage of a class writing project. To find out more, see our eBook No More: My Class Can’t Edit!
Grammar: Teaching grammar functionally helps older students (ages 12-18). We see moderate writing improvements. Effective grammar instruction focuses on practical application in writing and treats grammar as a decision-making process [LINK]. According to Graham and his colleagues, for younger students (ages 7-11), grammar instruction does not have a significant impact on the quality of children’s writing. With that said, our schools are having great success teaching our functional grammar mini-lessons [LINK].

Developing transcription skills

When students have wonderful ideas, they need to be able to write them down happily and successfully. Handwriting and spelling are crucial here [LINK]. These skills should become automatic to avoid slowing down children’s writing process. Ultimately, we want their audiences to be able to read their texts just as they intended.

Handwriting and spelling: Explicitly teaching handwriting and spelling to younger children (ages 5-11) results in small writing improvements [LINK]. Spelling instruction also benefits older students (ages 12-18) with moderate gains observed [LINK]. According to Graham, handwriting instruction for older students hasn’t been tested enough to draw conclusions.

Effective practices for teaching foundational writing skills

Spelling for young children: Use word sorting to teach common spelling patterns. For example, teaching long and short vowel sounds, finding words in reading and writing that match these patterns, and building words using these patterns [LINK].
Handwriting for young children: Teach letters every week that have similar formations. Have students identify similarities and differences, practise tracing, copying, and writing from memory, and use the taught letters in their writing [LINK].
Spelling for older students: Teach about the origins of words, such as roots, as well as common prefixes and suffixes [LINK].

Recommendation 4: Teach writing strategies

Writing strategies are the techniques writers use to plan, draft, monitor, revise, evaluate and proof-read their compositions. These strategies can help students manage the different processes involved in writing. Some strategies, like planning rivers, can be used for any writing project, while others are more specific, such as character monologue or sensory description. Modelling these strategies before inviting children to use them in their own writing gives students the tools to organise and improve their writing [LINK].

Recommendation 5: Teach creative craft moves and critical thinking

Teaching students creative craft moves and critical thinking can help them become better writers. Here’s why:

Creative craft moves: Encourage children to come up with new ideas and unique solutions for their writing. They also provide a way for students to visualise and imagine ideas for their texts [LINK]. For example, teaching children how to use similes, metaphors, and analogies in their writing.
Critical thinking: Helps students analyse and evaluate their writing more effectively [LINK]. For example, encouraging pupils to ask analytical questions about their writing.

By incorporating these skills into writing instruction, students can enhance their ability to generate ideas, critically assess their manuscripts, and visualise their writing more vividly.

Recommendation 6: Teach summary writing

Learning to write summaries is a key writing skill. It helps students identify and focus on the most important ideas and condense them into a clear, concise form. This skill is used when gathering content for writing in wider curriculum subjects [LINK] and when writing summaries about what they’ve read in the reading classroom [LINK].

Recommendation 7: Enhance students’ writing knowledge

Good writing relies on various types of knowledge [LINK]. This includes understanding language, writing topics, audiences, characteristics of good writing, writing genres, and the context in which writing is produced [LINK and LINK]. Writers with more knowledge about these areas can draw on these resources to create better texts.

Effective ways to increase writing knowledge

Reading as writers and emulating mentor texts

Providing children with mentor texts which they can read as writers has shown to have a positive effect on their writing. This includes reading a variety of examples of good writing [LINK].

Teach students the purposes, basic elements, and organisation of specific types of texts, such as persuasive essays or stories, helps improve their writing [LINK]. This approach involves introducing, analysing, and defining genre elements using mentor texts, and then having students create their own texts using these elements too [LINK].

Seeing their readers’ reactions

Observing others as they read and react to their texts [LINK], or watching how their teacher uses certain craft moves [LINK], can help improve children’s writing.

Recommendation 8: Embrace twenty-first century writing tools

Writing instruction in schools heavily relies on paper and pencil. Despite living in information-rich societies where digital tools dominate everyday writing outside of school, classrooms have been slower to adopt these technologies.

Word processors can offer numerous advantages over traditional handwritten methods. These tools make it easier to edit, revise, and organise texts quickly. They often include features for automatic spelling and grammar correction, which can improve the quality of children’s writing. AI programmes go further by assisting with planning, providing feedback and creating multimedia.

However, implementing these tools in classrooms requires teachers to become familiar with their use. Despite these challenges, the benefits are clear, especially for older students. Switching from handwriting to word processing has shown small improvements in writing quality for students aged 12-18.

For younger children, the benefits of using word processing have not been clearly demonstrated. While these tools can be used with younger students, they do not necessarily enhance their writing abilities compared to more traditional methods.

Recommendation 9: Integrate writing across the curriculum

Writing is a powerful tool for learning. When students write about what they’ve learnt in class—whether it’s in history or science – they deepen their understanding of that material [LINK and LINK].

Why writing enhances learning

Firstly, writing reinforces what students have learnt as they have to translate it into their own words. It encourages them to elaborate on their understandings, adjusting their previous knowledge to incorporate any new ideas they encounter. Writing also makes students more explicit about what they find important, helping them organise their thoughts into a clear structure. It engages them actively in deciding how to present information and transforms their understanding for the benefit of their readers. Finally, writing allows for reflection, as students review, connect, critique, and construct new understandings.

Effectiveness of disciplinary writing

Research has shown that writing about class material improves learning outcomes across different subjects. Students have shown consistent gains in learning when invited to write creatively about what they’ve learnt [LINK and LINK].

Recommendation 10: Writing in the reading classroom. Reading in the writing classroom.

Writing and reading go hand in hand—they support each other in important ways [LINK, LINK, LINK and LINK]. Writing about what they are reading in reading lessons enhances children’s comprehension of a text.

When schools give equal emphasis and timetabling to specific writing lessons and specific reading lessons, students show positive gains in both subjects.

Recommendation 11: Create a motivating writing classroom

Exceptional writing teachers often create inspiring classrooms that motivate students to write effectively [LINK]. These teachers implement several key practices:

Demonstrating passion: They show enthusiasm for writing, making it clear that they enjoy both writing and teaching it. They foster excitement about writing by visibly sharing their own enthusiasm with students [LINK].
Publishing children’s writing: Students’ writing is celebrated and published to a variety of audiences [LINK].
Promote collaboration: They encourage students to share their writing with peers and engage in positive interactions about writing [LINK].
Positive classroom culture: They cultivate an environment where students feel encouraged to try their best, believe in the effectiveness of the craft moves taught, and attribute success to their own efforts [LINK].
Agency: Children are supported to generate their own writing ideas within the parameters of the class writing project. Encouraging children to write about their own interests increases their attention and engagement [LINK].
Self-Regulation: Students are empowered to work independently and take ownership of their writing process [LINK].
Set high expectations: Teachers set challenging yet achievable goals for writing, encouraging students to surpass their previous achievements [LINK].

Creating such environments is expected to:

Increase children’s motivation for writing.
Improve students’ perception of the value of writing.
Enhance students’ success as writers within the classroom.

Final thoughts and conclusions

Teachers deserve to know about evidence-based writing practices which can improve their students’ writing. This article shares teaching practices which have a proven track record. However, it’s important to remember:

Incomplete picture: Our current understanding of teaching writing is always evolving, and future research will likely uncover new effective practices.
Contextual effectiveness: A practice that succeeds in improving writing in a research study may not yield the same results in the classroom.
Prioritise writing education: Given the pivotal role of writing in children’s learning and life outcomes, increasing our efforts and resources towards teaching writing effectively is imperative [LINK].