Writing
Article title
Questioning is the basis of all learning.
Overview
Introduction
This page includes bakground information to support ideas about writing in schools and developing a writing curriculum.
To achieve this, historically we have assumed learners needed to know how to physically print or use cursive writing to create letters as an essential part of a writing process. Learning to form letters was embedded in learning letter names and learning how to create them as part of an initial instruction of learning to read and write. For example with the use of a hornbook or other process to learn how to form letters and write.
As we developed technology from the printing press, to the typewritter, to today's electronic workprocessing, and verbal to print apps, we see these technologies as beneficial, without fully considering what might be lost without learning to personally print or write cursive. Recent research supports this.
- Handwriting, unlike typing or tracing, activates brain regions crucial for reading and may enhance reading acquisition in children.
- Handwriting has cognitive benefits, improves reading and writing skills, including word recognition, and enhances enjoyment of learning.
- Handwriting is linked to the development of executive function skills, such as planning and attention, in children.
- Handwriting engages the mind, improves attention to written language, and enhances knowledge retention.
- The fusiform gyrus, crucial for visualizing letters and words, is stimulated when writing.
- Laptop note-taking, even without distractions, can impair learning due to shallower processing and verbatim transcription, hindering information retention.
- Digitization of writing, particularly using keyboards, is more abstract and detached compared to handwriting, with implications that are not yet fully understood.
- Handwriting, often dismissed as inefficient, offers unique benefits like physical engagement, sensory experience, and potential cognitive advantages.
- While technology offers efficiency, it can also shape our thinking and limit our experience, as exemplified by the difference between typing and handwriting.
Handwriting offers cognitive and sensory benefits that digital tools cannot fully replicate, suggesting its continued relevance in a technologically-driven world.
Source: The Writing on the Wall
Writing as a process
Emphasis on writing as a finished product is less productive than writing as a process of creating a written product. While there is some variation in this process most agree stages of writing includes steps such as:
- Drafting,
- Revising,
- Editing,
- Proofing, and
- Publishing.
Nancie Atwell's writer's workshop is a popular means to facilitate children's writing through the stages of the writing process.
Other emphasises of writing supported by research include:
- Emphasis of learning - writing can cause knowledge to become organized and coherent. It can reinforce and extend learning. Writing to learn.
- Emphasis on reading - reading writing connection used to be viewed as opposite processes, but are now recognized as complementary activities.
- Emphasis on word processing - It is no longer a question of should this software be used, but how.
Research on the history of writing instruction
- 1874 was the first time composition was a university course (Harvard)
English as a discipline in public schools began in 1958. - Before 1962 emphasis was on the product, the analysis of the discourse, and preoccupation with the essay form and term paper.
- Birth of process of writing approach occurred in 1971 with Janet Emig's dissertation, The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders.
Variables of writing
- Time needed to write and time for teachers to assess
- Attitude needed to engage and energy to engage at a significant level
- Use of assessment rubrics raise many questions arise. There is always a level of subjectivity, how much and what level of grammar, mechanics, and content should be be evaluated and based on what standard?
- What discouraging effects does criticism have on students?
- How will electronic writing software support the writing process?
- Does the use of spelling and grammar checkers change the need for intensive instruction in these areas?
- As time using them increases will it will increase student proficiencies without direct instruction?
- Will the use of internet and electronic information for research and easy access effect learning?
- Will varying amounts of information available for paraphrasing to copying and pasting effect learning?
Donald Murray wrote a book in 1968 A Writer Teaches Writing - in it seven skills - discovers a subject, senses an audience, searches for specifics, creates a design, writes, develops a critical eye, and rewrites (pp. 2-12) in a recursive process - repeating and fed back into each other. Writing is about student choice to write to clarify and understand their own thinking. Multiple drafts, portfolios borrowed from artists...
Highly interactive drama, writing for different audiences, peer review, editing and adaption over formal writing assignments.
Students responding to literature through a process approach actually caused rioting in Kanawha County, West Virginia.
Students choose their own content, they become part of a community of writers, they write to explore, they have something to say to us and each other, and they publish what they write. Standard Five IRA/NCTE Standards for the English Language Arts (1969).
Students become frustrated by what they can't produce.
The Bay Area Writing Project became the site for the National Writing Project and included.
- Workshop approach
- Whole Language
- Trends in writing
- Holistic assessment
- Portfolio assessment
Writing assessment's big issues include - reliability and validity - what is the difference between a score of 2-3 or 3-4. This is no trivial thing, as differences of one level can mean the difference between a remedial label or not.
Technology and writing
- Digital texts can take the form of familiar text or be profoundly different to include multimodal with visual, auditory, and other non-verbal elements of hypermedia.
- Standardized testing is having a reductionist effect on the teaching of writing with programs such as 6+1 Writing Traits and America's Choice Writer's Advantage. Both encourage formulaic writing at the expense of critical thinking and creativity.
- With technology and writing we must no longer consider ourselves literate; rather we must assume a continued need to - become literate.
- Research suggests computers have a positive impact on student writing. They tend to write longer compositions, add more to their writing, and revise more. Technology makes it easier to compose and revise, identify problems with text, share tests, and become better writers and readers. Student collaboration occurs more frequently with compositions being accessible to read on computer screens. There is more variety and complexity of language used with creative writing projects on the computer. Spell checkers and grammar checkers give more feedback quicker allowing teachers to support the writer's idea development, clarity, and style.
Future writing
- Teacher's role should continue to increase in guiding students within information environments that are far beyond traditional print media. Integrated lesson using technology to enhance writing tha connect in school writing to out school literacies. Changes in idea of authorship.
- Education for an Information age: Teaching in the Computerized Classroom -
http://www.pitt.edu/~edindex/InfoAge6frame.html
IM instant messaging
Standards and outcomes
K-12 Comprehensive
WRITING Standard: Students will learn and apply writing skills and strategies to construct meaning.
Writing Process - Students will use the writing process to plan, draft, revise, edit, and publish
Curricular indicators -
Use prewriting activities and inquiry tools to generate and organize information, guide writing, answer questions and synthesize info rmation
Generate a draft by
- Selecting and organizing ideas relevant to topic, purpose, and genre
- Composing paragraphs with sentences of varying length and complexity
- Revise to improve writing (e.g., quality of ideas, organization, sentences, fluency, word choices, voice)
- Provide feedback to other writer; utilize others’ feedback to improve own writing
- Edit writing for format and conventions (e.g., spelling, capitalization, punctuation, grammar, usage)
- Publish a legible document (e.g., handwritten or electronic)
Writing Genres - Students will write for a variety of purposes and audiences in multiple genres.
Curricular Indicators
Examples of genres: essay, story, list, poem, instructions, letter, memo, class notes, memoir, biography, summary, response to literature, research paper, interview web page, play, book/film review song, journal, job application, resume, news article, email, poster, post-it note, brochure, report consistent with professional standards.
- Write in a variety of genres, considering purpose
- Write in a variety of genres, considering audience
- Write in a variety of genres, considering medium and available technology
- Write considering typical characteristics of the selected genre (e.g., business letter, letter to the editor, report, email, class notes, research paper, play)
- Write using well-crafted, cohesive organization appropriate to the task
- Analyze models and examples (own and others’) of various genres in order to create a similar piece
- Demonstrate preparedness to write in a variety of future personal and career situations
The Writing on the Wall
Humming away in offices in the White House is this technology that represents the pragmatism and unsentimental nature of U.S. bureaucracy: the autopen.
It's a device that stores a person's signature, replicating it as needed using a mechanical arm that holds a real pen.
U.S. presidents have been using autopens to sign letters and proclamations since at least the mid-1900s, though they still hesitate to admit doing so. That's because the use of this machine, and its mere existence, makes us uneasy. There's even something unnerving about the marketing materials for automatic signature machines, which emphasize the accuracy and trickery of their signatures, achieved, according to one manufacturer,
without compromising the impact of personalized correspondence.
Our mixed feelings about machine-signatures make plain our broad relationship to handwriting: It offers a glimpse of individuality.
Calligraphist Bernard Maisner argues that calligraphy, and handwriting more broadly, is
not meant to reproduce something over and over again. It's meant to show the humanity, the responsiveness, and variation within.
But handwriting is disappearing. In 2012, an assessment presented in partnership with the American Association of School Administrators claimed that as many as 33 percent of students struggle to achieve competency in basic handwriting in the U.S., meaning the ability to write legibly the letters of the alphabet (in upper- and lower-case letters). And school children aren't the only ones who struggle with handwriting, as fewer and fewer adults put pen to paper to record their thoughts, correspond with friends, or even jot down grocery lists. Many people no longer have the skill to do more than scrawl their name in an illegible script, and those who do will see that skill atrophy.
Karin James at Indiana University Bloomington published a study in 2012 comparing the learning styles of a small group of preliterate 5-year-olds who were instructed to type, trace, or handwrite letters and shapes. Using functional MRI scanning before and after the training, she found that a previously identified reading circuit in the brain, basically a network of brain areas that are associated with reading, was recruited during letter perception only after handwriting - not after typing or tracing experience.
Handwriting is important for the early recruitment in letter processing of brain regions known to underlie successful reading,
James and a co-author wrote,
and may facilitate reading acquisition in young children.
In some significant way, writing by hand, unlike tracing a letter or typing it, primes the brain for learning to read.
Earlier research drew similar conclusions about handwriting's cognitive benefits.
A study published in 1997 by psychologist Virginia Berninger at the University of Washington examined 700 elementary school students in Seattle, 144 of whom were struggling with reading and writing. After dividing the students into groups and testing various remedial activities to improve their performance, Berninger found that the group with the most improved handwriting also had improved reading and writing skills, including better word recognition. More importantly, the students in the group reported enjoying learning more.
Handwriting is not just a motor process,
Berninger and her colleagues wrote in the study.
It is also a memory process for letters - the building blocks of written language.
In a follow-up paper published in 2017, Berninger updated her work by examining how writing by hand relates to the development of executive function skills in children, such as planning and staying attentive to tasks.
She told The New York Times that she and her colleagues found once again that
handwriting - forming letters - engages the mind, and that can help children pay attention to written language.
She also noted the importance of one region of the brain, the fusiform gyrus, "where visual stimuli actually become letters and written words" - the "mind's eve" that allows us to visualize something before committing it to paper.
What about the rest of us who, for the most part, have abandoned writing by hand in favor of typing on keyboards?
We, too, might be impairing ourselves in significant ways when it comes to retaining knowledge.
Psychologists Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer compared college students taking class notes by hand or on a laptop computer to test whether the medium mattered for student performance.
Earlier studies of laptop use in the classroom had focused on how distracting computer use was for students. Not surprisingly, the answer was very distracting, and not just for the note-taker but for nearby peers as well.
Mueller and Oppenheimer instead studied how laptop use impacted the learning process for students who used them. They found that
even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing.
In three different experiments, their research concluded that students who used laptop computers performed worse on conceptual questions in comparison to students who took notes by hand.
Laptop note takers' tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning,
they wrote in 2014. In other words, we retain information better when we write by hand because the slower pace of writing forces us to summarize as we write, as opposed to the greater speed of transcribing on a keyboard.
We face a future without handwriting, and these researchers worry that abandoning the pen for the keyboard will lead to unforeseen consequences.
The digitization of writing entails radical transformations of the very act of writing at a sensorimotor, physical level,
notes Anne Mangen, who studies how technology transforms literacy. Writing on a keyboard with the words appearing on the screen is more "abstract and detached," something she believes has
"far-reaching implications" that "are far from properly understood."
When it comes to handwriting, it's popular to assume that we have replaced one old-fashioned, inefficient tool with a more convenient and efficient alternative.
We see its obsolescence not as a loss but as another mark of progress and improvement. But we are not accounting for what we lose in this tradeoff for efficiency, and for the unrecoverable ways of learning and knowing.
As a physical act, writing requires dexterity in the hands and fingers as well as the forearms. The work of writing by hand is part of the pleasure of the experience, argues novelist Mary Gordon.
I believe that the labor has virtue, because of its very physicality, she writes. "For one thing it involves flesh, blood and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that, however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.
Novelist Mohsin Hamid takes notes by hand in notebooks and tries to remove himself from the online world when he works on a novel, although he writes on a computer. "The technology is shaping me, configuring me," he told the BBC, and he sees danger in embracing that influence. The human way of doing things imposes limits, depending on our tools. Ten fingers can fly across a keyboard, but the experience of writing with a pen or pencil in one hand requires more patience.
The average American can type 40 words per minute but can only write 13 words per minute by hand. As calligraphist Paul Antonio notes, when he teaches children to write, he is really teaching them to slow down.
The pace of writing by hand, as with many embodied acts, is far slower than the tempo of tools that dominate modern life - the devices and algorithms that move at lightning speed, processing information and meeting our demands for instant gratification. The ease of the keyboard trains us to move with efficiency, and the more we use it, the more our habits of mind reflect that use.
In this environment, it isn't surprising that working with our hands now means honing technology-friendly techniques such as swiping and tapping.
The sheer extent to which we are using our hand in this new way makes it no exaggeration to say that swiping has now become a part and parcel of our culturally imherited ways of manual dexterity, like cutting with scissors writing with a pen, or turning a screw, one researcher wrote about the shift from pen to touch screen.
Handwriting's decline in a world dominated by screens may not seem important. It's a modest skill whose benefits are experienced privately and whose use in day life no longer makes sense for an increasing number of people.
But new technologies don't have to destroy the old ways of doing things, especially those that confer such compelling cognitive and sensory advantages. There's no reason to assume that the triumph
of the keyboard and touch screen over pen and paper is inevitable, or that the skill of handwriting is fully obsolete. The handwriting wand can still thrive in a world dominated by technology if we let it - that is, if we write off its overlocked benefits.