Hide Video Transcript Show Video Transcript
Joan Sedita: The writing rope basically has five pieces to it. Each one could be represented as if they were strands in a rope, right? And each one, we can talk about it, instruction about each level of the writing rope, and think about what we need to teach it and to practice it. But in the end, what students have to be able to do is integrate all of them at the same time, like strands in a rope, and then put them all together to be an effective writing. So what people often ask me, what are the strands in the rope? What are those components? Why did you organize it the way you did? The first strand is the critical thinking, and I put that up at the top. And this involves all the skills and strategies that are needed to be able to write about
So this includes everything from if you're reading something or watching a video and you want to write about it. It includes that ability to first decide what's important. And that involves a lot of critical thinking. It then involves being able to take some notes somehow to get that down. You're not going to hold it all in your head, right? So how do you get that down? So it's notetaking skills, but then it's also thinking about how you want to plan what you want to say about what you've just read or learned. And that starts to get us into another part of that first strand, which is the stages of the writing process. That first you have to think a little, then you have to plan a little, then you write a little, then you revise what you wrote, and then you recycle through that. So that's the critical thinking part of the strand.
It encompasses an awful lot of skills and strategies as well as the stages in the writing process. The second strand in the rope has to do with sentences. I call it syntax, but it's syntactical awareness, actually, that you're trying to develop with students. And if you think about it, the individual sentence is aside from words, it's the smallest unit of structure in a piece of writing. But if you can't write a good sentence, you're not going to be able to write anything else that's longer. And so it really is the core. And then we have a lot of older students who have difficulty with writing. And the problem is going right back to that basic sentence level. So that's the second strand. The third strand of the writing rope has to do with text structure. And this can cover really broad levels of text structure.
So for example, if you think about the three major types or genres of writing the narrative, informational and opinion or argument, if you're an older student, what are the structures that represent those three types? How do you write an introduction for each of them or a conclusion? How is the body developed? Narrative? The organizational structure might be beginning, middle, end. Informational, it's going to be big ideas and sub ideas. Opinion, it's going to be reasons and evidence and counterclaims and rebuttals. So that's the broadest level of text structure. But the next level down is paragraph structure and paragraph structure, along with sentence writing are the two sort of basic building blocks of being able to write any piece of text. And we have many, many students who do not have a sense of what a paragraph is, how you can organize your ideas into paragraphs, that when you move from one main idea to another main idea that that's time to start a new paragraph.
And then another piece that's very much connected to that are what's called patterns of organization. So that includes descriptive writing sequence or chronology, cause and effect, problem and solution. So patterns of organization, and that could be at a particular paragraph level I'm going to describe in this paragraph, and then this one I'm going to tell the order, or it could be several within one paragraph. And then the final piece of the text structure strand of the writing rope, our transition words and phrases. These are little, they're gems. They're like worth their weight in gold. And for students who have good language skills, transitions come naturally to them. They know to say however, and therefore, and first and next, and on the other hand, but for students who struggle with language and getting their ideas out, these words don't come naturally. So we need to explicitly teach them, and they very often signal a pattern of organization or they signal that you're about to move from one paragraph to another.
So that's the third strand of the rope. The fourth strand of the writing rope has to do with what I labeled writing craft. So this can include anything from, let's say, how you use dialogue in a narrative to get across a certain emotion or to get across some ideas that you want the reader to understand. It includes all those other literary devices that are out there, right? Flashback, allegory, simile, metaphor. There's so many of them. But the other thing that I tucked in under this strand of the rope is what's referred to often as TAP. And that's Task, Audience, and P urpose. Because as a writer, if you are not thinking about your audience, then your writing isn't going to address the needs of that audience. So a writer needs to always be thinking about who's going to read this? What is my purpose for writing this, and what is the actual task?
And that then ends up connecting with a lot of writer's craft or writer's move. The fifth strand in the writing rope is about transcription skills. So what does that mean? They are literally skills including spelling, handwriting, and/or keyboarding, and they're the skills that you need to literally transcribe the words on the page. Very often these, I sort of see these skills as best taught in a phonics lesson, rather than in a lesson where you're teaching students the skills that are associated with the other four strands of the rope, the critical thinking, the text structure, the sentence skills, the writing craft, right? Because transcription skills are all about, as it relates to the spelling, if students have a word they want to express, they need to know how to spell it, which means they need to know the alphabetic principle, and they need to know how phonemes the sounds and the words are represented by graphemes.
And all of that is best taught during a phonics lesson where you're learning those skills not only to spell the words, but also to decode them. I also think, especially with young children, handwriting actually begins when you're first learning the letter shape associated with the letter sound. And so as students are learning a letter sound combination, maybe the letter 'h' that goes with the sound /h/. If they're also writing that out, both the uppercase and the lowercase, if they're writing that out as they're saying the sound and seeing the letter, it not only supports their growth of alphabetic knowledge, but it also, that's where they begin beginning handwriting skills. Especially by the time students are in fourth grade, if they aren't fluent with being able to spell the words they want to say and hand write or type them out, then they're putting so much energy into that transcription part of the act that there's not much leftover for the critical thinking or the application of text structure knowledge, or how to apply things like being aware of the task audience and purpose and getting across the actual meaning in what you want to say.
Print and share this graphic with teachers in your learning community.
Find out more about The Writing Rope on our sister site, Reading Rockets. (opens in new window)
