Teaching the Writing Process in the Secondary Classroom

Early on in my teaching career, I fell in love with teaching the writing process. So much so, that I require students to follow the four steps of the writing process for nearly every writing assignment they complete – no more timed writes or sloppy first drafts!

What is the Writing Process?

The writing process is the process every writer follows in the course of creating a quality piece of writing. There are four steps of the writing process (prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing), but it’s better to think of the process as a wheel rather than a line because a writer often moves through each phase of the writing process more than once.

How to Introduce the Writing Process

Create a simple flowchart with your students – use large poster paper, so you can turn it into an anchor chart and refer to it throughout the year – and ask your students to follow along by taking notes in their notebooks. You’ll want to explain and define each step in a clear and concise way.

I like to use the following language:

Prewriting: Drawing, talking, or thinking about my ideas.
Drafting: Writing my ideas without worrying if my writing “sounds” smart or is written correctly.
Revising: Expanding, erasing, re-arranging, and connecting ideas to make the writing more clear, concise, and interesting.
Editing: Checking and fixing any errors in the writing, spelling, or punctuation.

How to teach Prewriting

Many students are so eager to jump into writing that they’re reluctant to spend much time in the prewriting stages. One of my biggest battles has been proving the value of prewriting to students and over the years, I’ve found a few tricks.

One of my favorites is to ask them to do “wordless planning.” This works great for narrative writing, but can also be applied to analytical writing and most other writing genres.

For wordless planning, students fold a blank paper to create 3, 4, or even 6 boxes. These boxes will represent sections or paragraphs topics for the writing. Students draw images in the boxes to represent the content they’ll write about in that section or paragraph.

For example, with narrative writing, students will decide on a story they want to tell and will turn their story into a 6-box story board. For an analytical essay, students might fold the paper into 3 sections and will draw images that represent the examples from the text they’ll use.

The key here is that students aren’t allowed to use any words on their paper – they must draw (however terrible they may claim to be at drawing!).

Introducing the “Verbal Draft”

After students have drawn their outline, they meet with a partner and “read” the plan. This is essentially a verbal draft – a step between prewriting and drafting. This is great because students get to run through what they plan to say about each topic without the time and energy commitment of writing a draft. This makes them more willing to change the verbal draft as they think of more ideas, details, and better ways to connect those ideas.

When students have each shared their verbal draft, they find a new partner and begin again. I repeat this process with at least 3 partners, so students get a chance to revise the story several times and so multiple partners can give feedback (which is also a great way to introduce peer revision and make peer revision less intimidating).

The reason it’s important students use drawings only and no words is because if they write words on their page, they tend to simply read those words to their partner, and the verbal draft they create with partners tends to remain static rather than to grow and expand like it should.

Drafting

When students are ready to draft, ask them to use pen and pencil (old school, I know). I ask students to skip lines (for the revision process) and to “just write.” “Just writing” means not judging whether it’s “good” or not, not using phones to look up words, spelling, or facts, and not leaning over to a friend to ask a question (although I assure them there will be plenty of time for that in the revision stage).

During this process, I tend to write my own draft and to show it to the class when they finish their drafts. I write my draft to reflect the “average” student’s writing in my class (spelling and punctuation errors and all), then we use my draft to practice revision.

Revising

If you wrote your own draft, make copies of the draft you wrote and share them with the class. Ask them to look through the draft and find suggestions they have for changes. Even if you remind students at the start, they’re still going to point out the punctuation or editing errors. That’s normal – these are the most obvious things that stand out, but resist the urge to jump into editing: Ask students what ideas they think need to be expanded, what transitions it needs, what sections seem repetitive or unclear.

I ask my students to work in partners to make revisions and changes and then ask them to move through the paragraph with me and share their revisions as we go. When they become more advanced as this step, I have each group read out their revised paragraphs, because over time, they’ll revise them to become very different from the original draft – true revision!

When we finish revising the model paragraph, students take a look at their own drafts and make any revisions they can. I usually ask students to use a different color in this stage, so they can see the changes they make more easily.

Editing

When we’re ready to begin editing, I type or write a new copy of the paragraph for students and we begin working through to edit the paragraph. I suggest being strategic about the errors you intentionally include in the sample paragraph. Choose a couple specific grammar or punctuation skills you’ve been working on and design the paragraph to reinforce those skills. ie: If students are pros at capitalization, don’t include any capitalization mistakes – they’ve mastered the skill.

Just like in the revising stage, students work in partners to edit, then share and discuss the changes as a class. Then they edit their own paragraphs independently. Again, I ask students to use a new color so they (and I) can see the edits they make.