Writing Development
Odetta Fields received her Bachelor’s in English Education from University of Missouri – Columbia and her Master’s in Education from Harvard. She has been teaching High School English for a number of years in the Pattonville School District, St. Louis County. Fields shared the characteristics of adolescent writers and some of her strategies for moving each student towards becoming an advanced writer.
“Providing models, even poor models and discussing why they are poor, helps students understand what and how to write. Also editing other students’ papers helps weaker writers develop more advance skills. But mostly, writing frequently and reading is what improves writing. The more they write, the more they grow accustomed to what their own voice sounds like on paper.”
Odetta Fields
High School English Teacher
Four Levels of Adolescent Writers:
Level 1 - Developing Writers
- Difficulty in organization of ideas especially in lengthier assignments.
- No overarching theme or thesis, difficulty correcting a thesis even when pointed out.
- No variety in sentence structures– all sentences are very short.
- No voice
- Grammar, mechanics, and spelling are distracting.
- Limited vocabulary.
- During a conference, developing writers can tell you exactly what they want to say and it is awesome. They just can’t write it.
- Sometimes difficulties are due to learning disabilities.
Level 2 - On Level Writers
- May have organizational issues, but know the overarching organizational patterns:
- Paragraph includes: topic sentence, details, and conclusion sentence.
- Essays include: intro with thesis, body, and conclusion.
- They can independently fix an organizational error when pointed out. When writing teacher asks, “Is this your thesis statement? Where does it belong?” student is able to correct the mistake.
- More sophisticated sentence structure, compound nouns and verbs, dependent and independent clauses.
- Have more voice - can hear their personality.
- Struggle with grammar and mechanics, but when pointed out, they can fix it. Mistakes are not distracting to the meaning of the writing.
- Broader vocabulary
- Conference with on level writer – they will come to you already knowing what they need help with. They know something is not right. More proactive in their writing.
- Take some risk – include a shocking statistic or cite a video clip news report.
Level 3 – Intermediate Writer
- Sophisticated organization.
- Transition words and phrases not only between paragraphs but within paragraphs.
- Don’t need help organizing – are often bothered when assigned an outline because they don’t need the outline as a tool.
- Use variety of sentence patterns.
- Aware of the rhythm of the words.
- Want their writing to sound beautiful and be “correct” at the same time.
- Intermediate writers come to conference with the teacher asking, “How do I get this to sound better?”
- Stronger vocabulary. Comfortable using thesaurus.
- Know that figurative language, simile, metaphors, and allusions exist and want to try using them in their writing.
- Willing to take risk in writing more often.
- Fine line between intermediate/advanced
Level 4 – Advance Writer
- Approach all writing from an organized starting point: know their thesis.
- Use a circular organizational pattern. Intro – open with an antidote. Conclusion –wrap up the antidote and create a call to action.
- Use grammar well with variety of new sentence styles.
- Sophisticated vocabulary and know denotation and connotation of a word and want to use the correct word forms.
- Proactive in getting their problems fixed. “In my first paragraph I did X, then in my concluding sentence I did X, but I don’t know if I bridged the ideas.”
- Just because they are advance in one genre doesn’t mean the student is advanced in all genres. The advance essayist might not be able to write poetry.
- Can be difficult to conference – very possessive of personal writing and over confidant. Parent might phrase comments creatively, “This is good, but here is what an experienced writer would do.”
- Risk takers in their writing.
