10 blocks to becoming a writer
They trip many kids who aren't LD

Becoming a writer is usually something your back of the room, bottom-of the class kids cannot imagine in their futures. Yet if those young people are going to survive in the information age, they must become writers.

Josh and Caitlin don't need to become professional writers. They don't need to write fiction or poetry. They won't even be required to blog if the don't want to. However, Joshn and Caitlin must be writers when they are required to write.

If a job application calls for a paragraph describing what they did on a summer job, students must be able to put produce a coherent paragraph with adequate detail and reasonably correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation — and they must do it in one draft.

That may not strike you as a high standard, but it's the standard Stephen King and Malcolm Gladwell had to meet when they filled out applications for their first summer jobs.

Blocks to becoming a writer

The students who struggle with writing typically experience difficulty in certain specific areas:

• Getting started writing.

• Developing ideas adequately.

• Correcting and editing their own writing.

• Time management.

• Dealing with details: students may ignore them or wallow in them.

• Focusing on the task at hand.

• Motivation.

• Self-confidence.

• Ability to self-monitor and self-correct.

• Weakness in the verbal learning mode in which most instruction is delivered.

Note that only the first three of the 10 problem areas for reluctant and struggling writers are exclusively writing-related. I discuss strategies for aiding students with exclusively writing-related problems throughout this website.

On this struggling writers thread, I will focus on factors that influence writing behavior but are not writing problems per se.

All students hit some writers' blocks

The three genuine writing problems are going to be problems to some degree for every single student on his or her way to becoming a writer.

The reluctant and struggling students may need more time, more practice, more repetition of the applicable strategies than the others. However, because they go through the same writing processes as the rest of the kids in the class, they don't feel singled out as weird or retarded.

Sometimes struggling and reluctant writers become decent writers almost instantly when they get a strategy for unblocking whatever it is that has held them back.

If you slap a "learning disabled" label on those kids and shunt them off into special ed, you will lose some of them entirely. Instead of becoming a writer good enough to complete a job application, the labeled kids may drop out of school and fail to find their niches in productive jobs.

Defeat blocks with strategic teaching

I find the most efficient way of dealing with struggling and reluctant writers is to identify which of the 10 problems listed above a student exhibits. Then I teach all the students with a particular problem the same strategies for coping with or overcoming the problem.

With 100 more more writing students, the classroom teacher must deal with the symptoms and leave diagnosis to someone else.

If Joshua cannot get started writing, it doesn't matter whether the basic problem is a learning disability, low intelligence, a food sensitivity, a problem at home, or the fact that nobody ever taught Joshua what he needs to know to get started writing.