Teaching Clarity in the Writing Process

My challenge teaching the writing process is getting students writing to sound clear. I have a few college freshmen that sentence by sentence, know what they want to say, but the sentences don't translate into an essay. How do I help them with clarity?

Here is an example from a student's writing with the topic of abortion. These sentences lack clarity.

"People live many ways from living with no money to having tons of money in cities and in the country. A million different ways and things drive people to live. With all the different ways people live should abortion and acceptable at all. With this in mind it brings up these questions."

I do not know how to begin to help the above student. English is his native language. I am assuming he has a learning disability. He is about age 18.

Linda's response

The student may have a learning disability, but he could simply be a kid with years of bad teaching or perhaps no teaching whatsoever about how to write. His basic problem is not lack of clarity; it's lack of anything to say. He doesn't know anything about abortion and lacks motivation to find out.

He can be exhibit A showing why students must be taught a writing process. His idea of a writing process is to write one sentence, let it suggest another, and keep doing that until he runs out of things to say (which won't be long!). I'd bet money he does no planning before he writes.

For starters, he needs
1. An authentic English class writing topic so what you go over in class and assign for reading becomes fodder for his writing. That eliminates the problem of students who know absolutely nothing about the writing topic.

2. A writing prompt that severely restricts his choice of thesis. Kids like him have to buy cereal at 7-11; a supermarket gives them too many choices.

3. To learn how to create a working thesis: topic + assertion.

4. To learn how to create a writing skeleton so he can think about his whole paper before starting to write. It is possible that if if you can teach the student all that he might be able to handle composition. It's not likely, but it is possible. Sometimes you get lucky.

Students like this often are helped by peer conferencing prior to writing. You still have to teach all the strategies, but you get the benefit of "teaching assistants." I designed my Talk It Out materials for such use.

I think if you focus on teaching a strategic writing process to this student, you will find his writing becomes clearer as he has genuine information to communicate.