Six Traits of Writing
Content / Ideas
Content / Ideas
Content / Ideas
Writing is a challenge for many and often, a significant amount of time passes while the page is still blank. This is when teacher / tutor patience is paramount. For many beginners, and skilled writers, those first words can pose a frustrating challenge. Because I understand this challenge, we have conversations that elicit ideas and work from there. We learn to identify whether topics are relevant to the prompt and how to move forward with the writing process.
Organization
Content / Ideas
Content / Ideas
Organization is key when students are writing for academics. Organization means that ideas are linked to one another and they follow a sequence of events or support a main idea or theme.
In the classroom and working privately with students, I have learned effective strategies to think about writing organization. If it works for the student, we integrate colors and shapes to associate types of ideas, such as a topic versus a supporting sentence. Then he or she learns to construct a solid paragraph. I work with students to develop an understanding of the difference between elaboration and simply stating a thought, or "showing vs. telling".
Learning to organize is a scaffold for all writing in the future. Once that basic organization is understood, students' abilities could potentially explode as they embark on the road to become authors. They can become as creative as they please, writing within or outside of that scaffold.
Voice
Content / Ideas
Word Choice
Using our voice in writing gives that writing the opportunity to take on a life of its own! Including our personality brings that writing to life. Our words become magnetic, causing the audience to be engaged with us and what we are saying. Expressing voice often includes the use of figurative language. That allows the audience to get more of a sense of who the author is or to better understand the character being portrayed.
Word Choice
Word Choice
Word Choice
As we become writers, how do we get our audience's attention and keep them engaged?
For this, word choice is paramount. Students have to make decisions on how to express their thoughts in ways that will maintain the audience's interest. Often this is a challenge, but how we word our arguments and descriptions can elicit different audience reactions. If we consider the reaction that we desire from the audience, we can choose words that cast the lines and hook our readers.
Fluency
Word Choice
Conventions
Writing fluency is when ideas move from one to the next in a flow together, without choppiness. This is accomplished through conjunctions and connecting words, transitions, the use of various sentence lengths, and using various sentence beginnings.
When students read their writing out loud, the flow becomes evident. If the writing is fluent, the reader should be able to move from one sentence to another without hesitation or feeling the need to stop.
Conventions
Word Choice
Conventions
Conventions are incredibly important. It is the idea of using complete sentences and correct punctuation. Spelling is also included in conventions. I work with all of my writing students to read their writing out loud, slowly and with thought. Learning how to identify sentences is much easier when we use our voice. When we read, we want to be aware of run-on sentences, incomplete sentences, commas, quotations and more.
When we use correct conventions, our writing flow improves and it is easier to read and understand.