4 Essential Principles of Writing Instruction

1. Students benefit from direct and explicit writing instruction.
2. Students need lots of practice, both oral and written.
3. Writing instruction needs to be systematic and cumulative.
4. Regular assessment should inform both your instruction and your feedback to students.

Like reading, writing is not a skill that develops naturally. Students need direct instruction to learn the many skills involved in becoming effective writers. When you introduce a new writing skill, you should explicitly explain what the skill is, why it's important, how to use it, and when to apply it. Your explicit writing instruction should include these elements:

• Teacher modeling and think-aloud to demonstrate the skill ("I Do")
• Lots of opportunities for students to practice with feedback ("We Do")
• Independent practice ("You Do")

For example, in a lesson on editing it might look like this:

• I Do: "Let me check over my work. Do I have a capital letter to start? No, I better add one! Would my reader understand it? Yes, it makes sense; it has a noun and a verb." And so on.
• We Do: "Let's look at this sentence together. Does it have correct capitalization and punctuation? What do we need to fix?"
• You Do: "Go through your recent writing sample and edit your work using CUPS."

This gradual release of responsibility gives students the instruction, practice, and feedback they need before we expect them to use a new skill on their own.

Use writing strategies to help your students get organized. Writing involves much more than putting ideas on paper. Students must plan what they want to say, organize their ideas, select appropriate words, evaluate their writing, revise for clarity, and edit for accuracy. Many students do not naturally know how to manage these steps or monitor their own progress. 

Writing strategies can help make the process more manageable. Strategies may include mnemonics, graphic organizers, and student-friendly checklists. These tools can support self-regulation and self-monitoring by helping students remember what to do, organize their thinking, and evaluate their own work. 

For example, our Reading Universe CUPS checklist (opens in new window) can support students through editing their paragraph writing, whereas a mnemonic like ART — that is, "Add, Rearrange, Take Out" — in our sentence combining skill explainer helps students remember how to carry out the skill. Over time, as students internalize these strategies and skills, you can gradually fade out the scaffolds.

Download the CUPS strategy (opens in new window).

Writing is complex, and writing skills take time to develop. This makes practice a critical piece of the puzzle. But effective writing practice is more than completing decontextualized workbook exercises or practicing a skill for one day and then leaving it behind. You should intentionally design practice opportunities that incorporate oral language across focused practice with new skills and authentic writing opportunities where students can apply and generalize what they have learned.

Prioritize oral language practice as the foundation for written language. Writing is said to be "language by hand." Therefore, developing language orally before putting pen to paper is very beneficial. For example, oral rehearsal, which is the opportunity to rehearse aloud what you intend to write, helps students organize their thinking, experiment with language, and practice forming meaningful sentences before adding on other demands like handwriting and spelling. You can foster a language-rich classroom by incorporating partner discussions, think-pair-share activities, and opportunities for your students to verbally rehearse responses.

Let's watch! In this writing lesson, Maria Bailey, a literacy support teacher at Riverside Elementary School in Toledo, Ohio, engages students in a sentence expansion exercise where students are practicing strictly through oral language.

Remember, students do not need to write every response in order to strengthen writing skills. When you consistently model speaking in complete and well-formed sentences — and require your students to do the same during classroom interactions — it helps strengthen students' language skills. This will support their written expression. 

Begin with intentional isolated practice to acquire new skills. For students to get good at something, they must have the opportunity to practice it. Because many writing skills depend upon other writing skills, this can be tricky. So intentionally planning for isolated practice is essential. 

For example, when you teach transition words, your students don't need to write entire paragraphs to practice the skill. Instead, isolate the skill for them. Give them a paragraph with the transition words removed. Have students read the paragraph, consider the relationship between the ideas, and select the transition words that work best. Writing a paragraph requires a writer to simultaneously enact many coordinated skills — such as developing an idea, constructing a topic sentence, spelling words correctly, fitting ideas together, and writing a conclusion sentence. That leaves limited cognitive resources and attention to actually focus on the new skill of using transition words. Isolated practice gives students repeated opportunities to focus on the skill you're teaching.

Here's another example: when you teach sentence combining, isolate the skill by providing students with sentences to combine and a set of coordinating conjunctions (opens in new window) they could use to combine them. Have students read the sentences and select the best coordinating conjunctions. Then they can discuss their choices with the class, a small group, or a turn-and-talk partner. Now, every student has selected coordinating conjunctions to combine sentences, and they are ready to try it in their own writing!

Download this student activity (opens in new window).

Move into authentic writing practice once students acquire a skill in isolation. Authentic writing gives students a meaningful reason to write beyond simply completing an assignment or earning a grade. Here are some authentic opportunities:

• Communicate by writing a letter to a school leader or community member
• Inform by creating a brochure or completing a research project
• Explain by writing a lab report or developing step-by-step directions
• Persuade by writing an essay that advocates for a change
• Reflect by writing about how they contributed to a group project or classroom activity

Authentic writing practice provides meaningful opportunities for students to apply the skills they have already worked on in isolation. For example, after students have practiced selecting transition words in a focused activity, they can apply those skills while drafting and revising an informational paragraph for a real audience. 

This progression from oral rehearsal, to focused practice, to authentic application helps students develop critical skills and apply them in written language effectively and independently.

Writing develops through a carefully sequenced progression of skills, and new learning should connect to and build upon previous skills. For example, a sentence continuum like you see here outlines a logical sequence for instruction.

Your students need to be able to write a complete simple sentence with a subject and predicate — and write it with sufficient fluency in handwriting and spelling — before you teach them how to write other sentence forms.

Provide instruction that meets each student where they are. Remember that not all of your students will be on the exact same skill level. Some students may need additional modeling, guided practice, or scaffolding before they're ready to move on, while others may be ready to apply their skills in more complex ways. When you assess students' needs and build writing skills in a logical sequence, you can provide instruction that is both responsive and effective, helping each student strengthen their writing in every subject. 

Assessment should not be the end of instruction but a guide for your next instructional decision. Collect ongoing information about students' writing through observations, writing samples, assessments provided by your curriculum, and rubrics to determine which skills students have mastered and which require additional feedback and instruction. 

Both formal and informal assessment provide valuable information that you can use to adjust your instruction and respond to students' needs. Equally important, you don't need to wait to finish a writing sample before you can assess. As you circulate and monitor the room while students are writing, you can observe how students apply newly learned skills and provide feedback in the moment. This feedback can help students make adjustments while they're actively engaged in the writing process and support the transfer of skills into their independent writing. 

Analyzing students' writing can help you identify specific strengths and needs. For example, a student's writing sample may show that they consistently apply mechanics correctly but need additional support selecting appropriate coordinating conjunctions. The student may rely heavily on the word and even when another conjunction would communicate the relationship between the ideas more clearly. This observation can give you a clear next step: provide targeted instruction and practice focused on choosing conjunctions based on the meaning of the sentences. 

Student-friendly checklists can help students take ownership of their writing. When they use a checklist that aligns with the teacher's evaluation criteria to review their work, everyone is working toward a shared understanding of what successful writing looks like. It's also a valuable scaffold that supports students learning how to give meaningful feedback to each other. For example, this student-friendly sentence-combining checklist (opens in new window) aligns with the teacher version (opens in new window), helping students monitor the same skills the teacher will evaluate.

When you collect data regularly, both formally and informally, you can make better informed instructional decisions. The information may indicate a need to adjust pacing, provide targeted small-group instruction, revisit previously taught skills, and/or increase the level of challenge.

You can apply all four of these instructional principles across writing tasks, content areas, and grade levels. As you plan future writing lessons, consider how each of these principles is reflected in your instruction:

• Are you delivering direct, explicit instruction to your students?
• Do they have opportunities to practice new skills orally, in isolation, and then through authentic writing?
• Does instruction build systematically on what students already know? 
• Are you using assessments to provide feedback and guide your next instructional decisions?

By intentionally incorporating each of these into your daily teaching, you can help students become more independent and proficient writers.

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has published two practice guides on evidence-based writing instruction: one focused on elementary students (opens in new window) and another focused on secondary students (opens in new window). The instructional principles presented in this article align closely with these recommendations, as well as findings from the Writing Next report (opens in new window), a comprehensive review of research on effective writing instruction. Below, we summarize the research that supports these practices. 

• Writing instruction is most effective when complex skills are broken into manageable components and taught explicitly before students are expected to apply them in extended writing tasks. Strong evidence supports teaching foundational writing skills and strategies through modeling, guided practice, and gradual release of responsibility (Institute of Education Sciences, 2012; Institute of Education Sciences, 2016).  
• Oral language supports writing development. Opportunities to discuss ideas, verbally rehearse responses, and engage in collaborative conversations help students generate ideas and organize their thinking to prepare for writing tasks (Institute of Education Sciences, 2012). 
• Explicit instruction in writing strategies, including planning, drafting, revising, and editing, has one of the strongest evidence bases in writing research. Students demonstrate greater improvements in writing quality when teachers teach self-regulation strategies and provide supports such as graphic organizers, checklists, mnemonics, and structured opportunities for reflection (Graham & Perin, 2007; Institute of Education Sciences, 2012; Institute of Education Sciences, 2016). 
• Students benefit from writing about familiar content and topics they are learning about already in the classroom. Integrating writing with reading, science, social studies, and other academic subjects improves both writing quality and content learning by providing meaningful opportunities to apply writing skills while deepening understanding of important concepts (Graham & Hebert, 2011; Institute of Education Sciences, 2012). 
• Writing skills develop over time and require systematic instruction, ongoing feedback, and lots of practice. Assessing students' strengths and areas for improvement and using that information to adjust instruction helps ensure that writing instruction remains responsive to student needs (Institute of Education Sciences, 2012; Institute of Education Sciences, 2016).