TEACHING WRITING

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TEACHING WRITING

• Geoff Barton
• March 2001

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TEACHING WRITING

• How weve often (not) taught writing in the past
• Recognising good writing
• Actively teaching writing

• www.geoffbarton.co.uk

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TEACHING WRITING
How weve often (not) taught writing in the past

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TEACHING WRITING
Read this opening from the novel Bleak House
h ghgh ghgh ghght y ftrd rdgxkjahkjh kh sbagzj ws
asuwq wq qu iuu h u g 7aijqm.1xz loli3ji h
u h asuwq wq qu iuu u g 7aijqm.1xz loli3ji
h u h asuwq wq qu iuu h u g 7aijqm.1xz
loli3ji h u h ghgh ghgh ghght y ftrd rdgxkjahkjh
kh sbagzj ws asuwq wq qu iuu h u g
7aijqm.1xz loli3ji h u h asuwq wq qu iuu h
u g 7aijqm.1xz loli3ji h u h asuwq wq qu iuu
h u g 7aijqm.1xz loli3ji h u h ghgh ghgh ghght
y ftrd rdgxkjahkjh kh sbagzj ws asuwq wq qu iuu
h u g 7aijqm.1xz loli3ji h u h asuwq wq qu
iuu h u g 7aijqm.1xz loli3ji h u h asuwq wq
qu iuu h u g 7aijqm.1xz loli3ji h u h ghgh
ghgh ghght y ftrd rdgxkjahkjh kh sbagzj ws asuwq
wq qu iuu h u g 7aijqm.1xz loli3ji h u h
asuwq wq qu iuu h u g 7aijqm.1xz loli3ji h
u h asuwq wq qu iuu h u g 7aijqm.1xz
loli3ji h u h Now write your own opening of a
novel.

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TEACHING WRITING
KS3 tests 2000
Write the opening of a story about a major
emergency. Some people waste a lot of time and
energy attempting difficult challenges, such as
flying around the world in a hot-air balloon.
Attempts like these are pointless, and benefit
nobody. Write an article for your local
newspaper arguing for or against this statement.

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TEACHING WRITING
To be truth-full I am for the argument about
wasting time and money trying to get around the
world in a hot air balloon, when this time and
money could be spent on working with medical
difficulty or people who are homeless.
I feel it is very important to face challenges,
as without challenges, the world would be a very
dull place. I feel that the earlier challenges
appear in a persons life, the better, as there
will undoubtedly be challenges in the workplace
or in home life, and so I feel that the people
who have faced challenges earlier in life get a
head start over people who have not.
Level 4 Level 7
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TEACHING WRITING

• You dont teach writing merely through
• Reading aloud
• Showing models
• Highlighting genre features
• Correcting first drafts
• Lots of bullet-points after the task

Model it Demonstrate it Practise it Critique
it Scaffold it
DEPENDENCE
INDEPENDENCE

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TEACHING WRITING
What are the qualities of successful and
unsuccessful writing?
(Or understanding the authors craft)

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TEACHING WRITING
Unexpectedness
Clarity
Visual immediacy
Having something to say
Sentence variety

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TEACHING WRITING
Jonathan Raban
The road to Dubai is long, straight, dusty,
littered with wrecked cars and punctuated only by
the odd windswept gas station. There are no
villages, no oases, and the Gulf is hidden behind
sand-dunes which look as if they are suffering
from some sort of desert scurf or mange. It is
the kind of road on which car crashes look like
philanthropic gestures they at any rate do
something to provide a momentary relief in that
monotony of sand and rusted oil drums.
Skeetering Cola cans, blowing across the highway,
make an ersatz wildlife half-close your eyes,
and you can imagine them as rabbits, surprised in
a hedgerow on an English lane. On second
thoughts, dont they are just Cola cans,
tumbling in the wind across the Arabian desert,
their paint stripped, sandblasted down to bare
metal.

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TEACHING WRITING
Jonathan Raban
The road to Dubai is long, straight, dusty,
littered with wrecked cars and punctuated only by
the odd windswept gas station. There are no
villages, no oases, and the Gulf is hidden behind
sand-dunes which look as if they are suffering
from some sort of desert scurf or mange. It is
the kind of road on which car crashes look like
philanthropic gestures they at any rate do
something to provide a momentary relief in that
monotony of sand and rusted oil drums.
Skeetering Cola cans, blowing across the highway,
make an ersatz wildlife half-close your eyes,
and you can imagine them as rabbits, surprised in
a hedgerow on an English lane. On second
thoughts, dont they are just Cola cans,
tumbling in the wind across the Arabian desert,
their paint stripped, sandblasted down to bare
metal.

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TEACHING WRITING
England won the first corner straight off in the
first minute, and from the clearance coming out,
Gazza fired in a rocket of a volley that looked
to be just curving wide but Illgner lunged to
push it away anyhow, and we had a second corner.
And then we had a third our football was
surging and relentless we were playing like the
Germans did, and the Germans didnt like it.
Bruises and knocks, sore joints and worn limbs,
forget it theres no end to the magic hope can
work. Wright had Klinsmann under wraps Waddle
released Parker, Beardsley went through once, and
then again Hassler took the Germans first
serious strike, and it deflected away from Pearce
for their first corner but Butcher towered up,
and headed away. Then Wright picked a through
ball off Klinsmanns feet the German looked
angry and rattled. You could feel their pace,
their threat but still we had them, and the
first phase was all England. No question
England could win this. The press box was
buzzing. Gazza tangled with Brehme he got
another shot in, then broke to the left corner,
won a free-kick Lets all have a disco Lets
all have a disco. It was more than a disco, it
was history.

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TEACHING WRITING
England won the first corner straight off in the
first minute, and from the clearance coming out,
Gazza fired in a rocket of a volley that looked
to be just curving wide but Illgner lunged to
push it away anyhow, and we had a second corner.
And then we had a third our football was
surging and relentless we were playing like the
Germans did, and the Germans didnt like it.
Bruises and knocks, sore joints and worn limbs,
forget it theres no end to the magic hope can
work. Wright had Klinsmann under wraps Waddle
released Parker, Beardsley went through once, and
then again Hassler took the Germans first
serious strike, and it deflected away from Pearce
for their first corner but Butcher towered up,
and headed away. Then Wright picked a through
ball off Klinsmanns feet the German looked
angry and rattled. You could feel their pace,
their threat but still we had them, and the
first phase was all England. No question
England could win this. The press box was
buzzing. Gazza tangled with Brehme he got
another shot in, then broke to the left corner,
won a free-kick Lets all have a disco Lets
all have a disco. It was more than a disco, it
was history.

• www.geoffbarton.co.uk

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TEACHING WRITING
Non-fiction models
The Life of Charles Dickens Chapter 1 CHARLES
DICKENS, the most popular novelist of the
century, and one of the greatest humorists that
England has produced, was born at Lanport, in
Portsea, on Friday, the seventh of February,
1812. His father, John Dickens, a clerk in the
navy pay-office, was at this time stationed in
the Portsmouth Dockyard. He had made
acquaintance with the lady, Elizabeth Barrow, who
became afterwards his wife, through her elder
brother, Thomas Barrow, also engaged on the
establishment at Somerset House, and she bore him
in all a family of eight children, of whom two
died in infancy. The eldest, Fanny (born 1810),
was followed by Charles (entered in the baptismal
register of Portsea as Charles John Huffham,
though on the very rare occasions when he
subscribed that name he wrote Huffam) by another
son, named Alfred, who died in childhood by
Letitia (born 1816) by another daughter,
Harriet, who died also in childhood by Frederick
(born 1820) by Alfred Lamert (born 1822) and by
Augustus (born 1827).

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TEACHING WRITING
Non-fiction models
DICKENS CHARLES DICKENS was dead. He lay on a
narrow green sofa but there was room enough for
him, so spare had he become in the dining room
of Gads Hill Place. He had died in the house
which he had first seen as a small boy and which
his father had pointed out to him as a suitable
object of his ambitions so great was his
fathers hold upon his life that, forty years
later, he had bought it. Now he had gone. It
was customary to close the blinds and curtains,
thus enshrouding the corpse in darkness before
its last journey to the tomb but in the dining
room of Gads Hill the curtains were pulled apart
and on this June day the bright sunshine streamed
in, glittering on the large mirrors around the
room. The family beside him knew how he enjoyed
the light, how he needed the light and they
understood, too, that none of the conventional
sombreness of the late Victorian period the
year was 1870 had ever touched him. All the
lines and wrinkles which marked the passage of
his life were new erased in the stillness of
death. He was not old he died in his
fifty-eighth year but there had been signs of
premature ageing on a visage so marked and worn
he had acquired, it was said, a sarcastic look.
But now all that was gone and his daughter,
Katey, who watched him as he lay dead, noticed
how there once more emerged upon his face beauty
and pathos.
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TEACHING WRITING
Phone-a-Friend Time
A How to tell how old a raw egg is while it is
safely tucked away in its shell could seem a bit
tricky, but not so. Remember the air pocket?
There is a simple test that tells you exactly how
much air there is. All you do is place the egg in
a tumbler of cold water if it sinks to a
completely horizontal position, it is very fresh
if it tilts up slightly or to a semi-horizontal
position, it could be up to a week old if it
floats into a vertical position, then it is stale.

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TEACHING WRITING
Phone-a-Friend Time
B When it comes to food, I am a man of many
moods shaped by influences both from within my
immediate circle and by what is going on outside.
I am constantly on the move and rarely still.
There is still so much to discover, to taste and
to try out. The success of our menus depends on a
balance of popular choices and experimenting with
new flavours and ideas to push the boundaries out
still further. Perfection of skills and technique
reassures our customers, but constant creativity
keeps them coming back for more.

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TEACHING WRITING
At around 1 for a large fruit, the pineapple is
no longer the special-occasion fruit it was in my
childhood. (If there is a pineapple in the fruit
bowl, then it must be Christmas.) More recently,
in the lush, tropical heat of Goa, the fruit
became a daily ritual during a beach-bum holiday.
Armed with a plump pineapple, chosen for its
ripeness and stripped of its inedible skin by the
stallholders fearsome machete, we would wander
far along the deserted beach to make the most of
the fruit and its sticky juice. Six months
later, in the frost-covered gardens of
Versailles, the statues and urns wrapped up for
the winter, such a fruit seemed even more
welcome, cheering us up as our teeth chattered
and we dripped juice into the snow as we walked.
It is this fruits impeccable timing, turning up
sweet and gold in the depths of winter, that
probably makes it so popular. Nigel Slater, Real
Good Food
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TEACHING WRITING
ACTIVELY TEACHING WRITING

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TEACHING WRITING
So what would you do ?
Year 9 Text Level Writing - plan, write and
present 3. produce formal essays in standard
English within a specified time, writing fluently
and legibly and maintaining technical
accuracy when writing at speed

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TEACHING WRITING
So what would you do ?
Year 9 Sentence level Paragraphing and
cohesion 6. compare and use different ways of
opening, developing, linking and
completing paragraphs

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TEACHING WRITING
So what would you do ?
Text level Writing Inform, explain, describe 11.
make telling use of descriptive detail, e. g.
eye- witness accounts, sports reports, travel
writing

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TEACHING WRITING
So what would you do ?
Year 9 Writing Imagine, explore, entertain 5.
explore different ways of opening,
structuring and ending narratives and experiment
with narrative perspective, e. g. multiple
narration

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TEACHING WRITING
So what would you do ?
Text level Writing Inform, explain, describe 12.
exploit the potential of presentational
devices when presenting information on paper or
on screen, e. g. font size, text layout, bullet
points, italics

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TEACHING WRITING
Model it Demonstrate it Practise it Critique
it Scaffold it
Including bad models
Show students the process of writing
Correct/change/improve
Make it collaborative
Move from small to larger sections

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TEACHING WRITING
The Set-Up
BUILDING SUSPENSE Write the opening of a
mystery story. Set it at a funeral in a wintery
churchyard.
v v v

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TEACHING WRITING
bad
Using models
Before . It was a bitterly cold day. Everyone
was in black. The cars were black too. There were
people standing around in a group waiting for the
coffin. Crows were flying in the sky. It was
really eerie.
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TEACHING WRITING
Using models
After . The undertaker's men were like crows,
stiff and black, and the cars were black, lined
up beside the path that led to the church and
we, we too were black, as we stood in our
pathetic, awkward group waiting for them to lift
out the coffin and shoulder it, and for the
clergyman to arrange himself and he was another
black crow in his long cloak. And then the real
crows rose suddenly from the trees and from the
fields, whirled up like scraps of blackened paper
from a bonfire, and circled, caw-caw-ing above
our heads.
Susan Hill
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TEACHING WRITING
Demonstrating, critiquing and scaffolding ...
Press for action

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TEACHING WRITING
GBs Final Thoughts

• See things as a writer, not just a reader
• Explore texts actively - meddling, rewriting,
  editing
• Demonstrate the writing process yourself
• Relate everything to effect
• Talk about grammar where it helps, not as an end
  in itself
• Start with small units of writing then build up
• Encourage experimentation, risk-taking,
  creativity
• Enjoy!

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TEACHING WRITING

• Geoff Barton
• March 2001

All resources available at www.geoffbarton.co.uk