Seeking a daily writing prompt?
Dozens are as close as your curriculum

Many teachers seek writing prompts that they can use to get students doing a little writing every day. They may not know they have a whole curriculum full of prompts to draw on.

Before we plunge into the discussion, you may want to fire up your electronic notepad or pull out a pencil and scratchpad. You'll see why in a minute.

Let me begin by asking you a question.

What do you understand by the term daily writing prompt? Please answer in no more than three sentences. You have two minutes. (There's a clock at the right.)

What you just did (you did do it, didn't you?) was respond to an informal writing prompt that's part of the "lesson" on this web page. It represents a easy, authentic way to use use writing in teaching.

Daily prompt requirements

For daily use, you need writing prompts that

• Don't require lengthy "prewriting."

• Can be answered briefly.

• Are worth writing about.

Informal writing prompts, often called write-to-learn activities, are expository writing prompts that meet each of those criteria. You can use them once (or more!) every class day to help you meet your annual objectives.

By preparing your own daily writing prompt instead of downloading some from the Internet, you get far more mileage from each prompt. You can not only have students write, but also

• Require writing in formats that reinforce your writing instruction.

• Require writing on topics that reinforce what students are learning in their classes.

• Use student responses as formative evaluations.

The little effort that you need to spend to prepare your own prompts is well worth those benefits, don't you agree?

Characteristics of informal prompts

Informal prompts offer students opportunities to reflect on what they are studying by forcing them to respond to a specific question about it. Such prompts require responses that are . . .

• Short — a few sentences at most.

• Quick — a first reaction, not a thoughtful, studied response.

• Timed — typically 1 to 5 minutes by the clock or an ordinary kitchen timer.

• Ungraded — responses are submitted or not; quality of answers and writing isn't evaluated.

• Focused — directed to the lesson being studied.

• Written in sentences.

You haven't time enough to grade informal writing. Don't even try. However, encourage students to check their work quickly before they turn it in.

A very good way to do that is to tell students 30 seconds before the timer goes off to check their work for one particular error that's on your hit list for the year. You might be working on starting every sentence with a capital letter or using the correct spelling of there/their/they're. If you have five errors on your annual list, you can work on each one for six weeks.

Not every student will have one of your "counts off" list items in every daily writing prompt. If you want to make the writing situations authentic, you have to allow time for situations to arise in which students need to address the errors you are targeting.

Use as admit slips

Some teachers have a standing assignment requiring students to turn in an "admit slip" as they enter the classroom. The admit slips are daily writing prompts under an assumed name.

The slip (often a 3x5 index card) might require a summary of the most important points of the previous night's reading assignment.

Math teachers often use admit slips to probe for information about what gave a student the most problem in the previous day's assignment. You could do something similar if you assign grammar exercises.

Keep attention during class

If the idea of giving the same type of assignment each day turns you off, there are still plenty of other ways to use informal writing prompts on a daily basis. For example, during a lesson period, you can use informal prompts to probe the extent of student understanding.

Let's say you were teaching a grammar lesson on verb tense. You might give an informal prompt like this:

Write a sentence using the verb hike. Then write the sentence again changing the verb to hiked. In 2-3 sentences explain how the meaning of the sentence changed when you changed the verb tense.

That activity not only is quick for students to do (2-3 minutes) but it helps students focus on the meaning of verb tense in a way that's real and personal. The sentences that provide the example are the students' own work. Students examine how a simple change affects their writing.

End by checking for understanding

Informal prompts can be used at the end of a class as a check on learning. The end-of-class prompt might ask for such things as

• A summary of the main point of the lesson.

• Identification of material that's still not clear.

• How the material can be used.

For teaching writing skills

I routinely use informal prompts that call for what is, in effect, a writing skeleton™ (a thesis and its 2-3 supporting points). In that way, I force students to think in terms of thesis and support regularly.

Those prompts are a little trickier to to prepare. You have to test them yourself to be sure they can be answered with something approximating the responses you expect.

Your prompt for today

Below is a writing prompt based on the material on this page. It asks you to provide material in the thesis-and-support pattern.

Now that you've read about preparing daily writing prompts from your own curriculum materials, what questions and concerns do you still have? Identify one question or concern and give three reasons what that bothers you. Please keep your response to no more than four complete sentences. You have three minutes.

Try answering the prompt yourself. I'll wait.

Did you see that your daily writing prompt response is really an outline that you could use as the framework for a nicely developed expository paragraph or even an expository essay?

Is that cool or what?

Without much effort on your part, your daily writing prompt can prepare students to write sensibly on demand with a minimum of stress. As a bonus, you'll see gains in comprehension of other course content as well.