100 Tips for Developing Young Writers
To celebrate the publication of my mini guide, The Seven S’s of Developing Young Writers, here are 100 tips for #youngwriters. My ebook mini guide is on *special offer* this week at only 99p. You can see my 10 top tips in an article I wrote for the TES.
To celebrate the publication of my mini guide, The Seven S’s of Developing Young Writers, here are 100 tips for #youngwriters. My ebook mini guide is on *special offer* this week at only 99p. You can see my 10 top tips in an article I wrote for the TES.
Tip No.1: As well as teaching children *how* to write, we must also find ways to make them *want* to write.
Tip No.2: Technique and accuracy are important, but balance is vital. Leave time/space for expressive freedom.
Tip No.3: Marking is a form of editing. The end goal is to get people to edit their own writing by/for themselves.
Tip No.4: You can only write what you can say. Speaking really matters. Make talk a central part of your approach.
Tip No.5: Every time you speak in your classroom, you model talk for your students. Speak (mostly) as you want them to write.
Tip No.6: Chuck in the odd colloquialism or interesting turn of phrase, too. Show them how to play with language.
Tip No.7: When you give instructions, emphasise the time connectives, to show your students how these words sequence ideas.
Tip No.8: Use Q&A time to encourage students to develop their speaking – ask them to rephrase and elaborate their ideas.
Tip No.9: Use a variety of imaginary contexts in lessons, to show your children how people speak in different situations.
Tip No.10: Ask your students to listen in to how other people talk and to capture ‘snippets’ of interesting dialogue.
Tip No.11: Get your children to re-tell a familiar story to a partner. Fairytales work really well for this.
Tip No.12: Think creatively about using multi-sensory stimuli to inspire writing. Texture, light, nature, objects, plants.
Tip No.13: We often focus on the senses of touch, sight and hearing. Don’t forget to include taste and smell as well. ;)
Tip No.14: You wouldn’t do a physical activity without a warm-up; incorporate writing warm-ups into lessons as well.
Tip No.15: Use a ‘stream of consciousness’ as a quick warm-up. Focus on dumping what’s in your head, rather than on technique.
Tip No.16: Objects make a fantastic stimulus. Who *did* leave that suitcase in our classroom and what on earth is inside it?
Tip No.17: Ask your students to look at a photo, close their eyes, and then imagine walking around ‘inside’ the image.
Tip No.18: Music is a great stimulus for writing – use Greig’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” to inspire fantasy settings.
Tip No.19: Get your students to translate one sense into another – what is the sound of mint, or the taste of rain?
Tip No.20: Remove a sense to inspire writing – what can we hear or smell if we walk around blindfolded?
Tip No.21: Reading is a fantastic stimulus and support for writing. Read anything and everything is great advice.
Tip No.22: Weird titles make a great stimulus: The Day the Earth Stopped Turning or My Brother is an Alien.
Tip No.23: Share samples of children’s writing, using a visualiser. Show writing when it is still “hot off the press”.
Tip No.24: Experiment with a variety of surfaces for writing – windows, desks, tarmac, walls, cellophane, sand, clay.
Tip No.25: Learning to touch type is fantastically useful. It is an investment in time that is well worth making.
Tip No.26: Help your children invest in their writing by giving it as valid and authentic a sense of purpose as you can.
Tip No.27: Unless it’s a private diary, every piece of writing is written for an audience. Look for ‘real world’ audiences.
Tip No.28: Consider the size of the audience – the bigger the audience, often the greater the incentive to write well.
Tip No.29: Set up a class blog, and use challenges such as www.100wc.net and www.lendmeyourliteracy.com.
Tip No.30: Self publishing is pretty straightforward these days – publish your students’ writing via www.kdp.amazon.com.
Tip No.31: Play around with form and subvert expectations – write a ‘poem of complaint’ rather than a letter.
Tip No.32: Writing is physical, as well as intellectual. Use activities to build strength: cutting, threading, tearing.
Tip No.33: Get good handwriting habits in place early on – it’s much easier to build good habits than to break bad ones.
Tip No.34: Remember that children who are left-handed need to form their letters in a different way. See http://bit.ly/1Imusv5.
Tip No.35: Have high expectations about handwriting, but don’t limit self expression in a desire to encourage neatness.
Tip No.36: Don’t mistake neat handwriting for good ideas, or vice versa – it’s surprisingly easy to mix up the two.
Tip No.37: Focus on building children's hand and finger strength. You can find useful exercises here: http://www.rch.org.au/uploadedFiles/Main/Content/ot/InfoSheet_E.pdf.
Tip No.38: Watch out for poor pencil grip and correct this early on. Help your students develop a good ‘tripod grip’.
Tip No.39: Be fussy about posture when writing – children will spend an awful lot of time sitting writing at school.
Tip No.40: Help small children develop their phonological awareness with lots of listening activities. This helps reading/spelling too.
Tip No.41: Teach your students lots of strategies for learning spellings, rather than just giving them word lists to learn.
Tip No.42: Look for relationships between words to support spelling. Find groups of related words, such as one/once/only.
Tip No.43: Ask students to develop a ‘spelling voice’ for saying oddly spelled words in their heads (e.g. Feb-RU-ary).
Tip No.44: Etymology is not only a great way into spelling, it is also fascinating: explore the roots of words.
Tip No.45: To handle homophones, look for logical reasons for different spellings. ‘Their’ has ‘I’ in it and refers to you.
Tip No.46: Children often understand the theory behind punctuation, but still don’t use it properly. Motivation matters most.
Tip No.47: Talk about *why* punctuation matters – what does it actually do to our writing?
Tip No.48: To avoid full-stop-free writing, get your children to form each sentence in their heads before they write it down.
Tip No.49: To solve ‘exclamation mark disorder’, get your students to ration them. 1 per 1,000 words is more than enough.
Tip No.50: Show your children how *writing* can exclaim. We don’t actually need exclamation marks to do that for us.
Tip No.51: Translate speech bubbles into speech marks: the speech marks contain the words/punctuation, just like the bubbles.
Tip No.52: Make a ‘speech mark sandwich’ – punctuation goes inside the speech marks, just as ketchup goes inside the sandwich.
Tip No.53: We learn the grammar of our native tongue by speaking it. If children say ‘would of’, they will write ‘would of’.
Tip No.54: Remember that the reason grammar matters is because of what it *does*, not what it's *called*.
Tip No.55: Create your own pieces of writing to use in class – both ‘good’ examples, and ‘bad’ ones too.
Tip No.56: Pick apart the internal structures of other people’s writing, to show your students how structures work.
Tip No.57: Keep a record of the ‘history’ of a piece of writing, to show how structure is built up by the editing process.
Tip No.58: Encourage your children to think of writing as more like building a house, than going from A to B.
Tip No.59: As you model writing for your children, talk about the processes inside your head. What decisions do you make and why?
Tip No.60: Show your children snippets of text to identify forms.. How can they *tell* that these 5 words are in a news report?
Tip No.61: Use Pie Corbett’s story-mapping technique, to show your children how stories have an internal structure.
Tip No.62: Translate stories into diagrams, using symbols to demonstrate time, place, character, purpose.
Tip No.63: Do plenty of oral story-telling, so that the children internalise the way that writing is structured.
Tip No.64: Use an agreed set of marking symbols in writing books, to save yourself time.
Tip No.65: Include notes, diagrams and jottings in writing books, as well as chunks of text. Make it a working document.
Tip No.66: See marking as part of the process of *scrutiny*, rather than as something that the teacher does for the child.
Tip No.67: Scrutiny and self-editing should go on *during* the process of writing, and not just when the writing is ‘complete’.
Tip No.68: Remember that is a powerful and sometimes painful thing, to have your writing ‘marked’ and ‘corrected’.
Tip No.69: Show your children that you are a writer too. Share pieces of your writing with them, especially ones that didn’t go well.
Tip No.70: Sometimes, overcome your desire for evidence and *let your children do a piece of writing then throw it away*.
Tip No.71: Create fictional characters who leave behind slightly dodgy piece of writing that the children can examine..
Tip No.72: Balance the positive with the negative when marking – focus on keeping children’s writing confidence high.
Tip No.73: Collect samples of the writing that we do in real life – shopping lists, rough notes, etc. – to show its value/usefulness.
Tip No.74: Talk to your students about what their writing makes you *feel*, as well as what it makes you *think*.
Tip No.75: When you use colour coded marking techniques, share what the colours mean with parents as well as with students.
Tip No.76: Word choice is crucial for great writing, so get your students to really think about this. *Why* pick this specific word?
Tip No.77: Writing ‘style’ is about developing a unique writing ‘voice’. It was what moves writing from competent to great.
Tip No.78: The only way to improve your writing is to get it wrong, before you get it right.
Tip No.79: Experiment with taking on the voices of other writers – Jeff Kinney (the Wimpy Kid author) is fun to try.
Tip No.80: When you introduce figurative techniques such as metaphor, take care that your students don’t over-egg the pudding.
Tip No.81: Just because you know what a simile is, doesn’t mean you have to use one in every sentence.
Tip No.82: It’s important to learn the rules of writing, because then you can get to break them consciously.
Tip No.83: It can be fun to ban clichés and over-used words. I once met someone who held a funeral for the word ‘nice’ with a class.
Tip No.84: Develop metaphors in ‘sets’, for instance a ‘weather’ set. “Her face clouded over” or “his voice thundered”.
Tip No.85: Use topical events to freshen up your similes: “They fought like crazed politicians desperate to win the Referendum.”
Tip No.86: Draw abstract concepts, to help your children conceptualise them. For instance, drawing an “elephant in the room”.
Tip No.87: Engaging the reader is key, because if I don’t want to read what you wrote, I will stop reading.
Tip No.88: Play a game of ‘what is this sentence trying to do to me?’ Examine author intentions in great detail.
Tip No.89: The thing missing from most young writers’ stories, is dramatic tension. Look carefully at how writers develop this.
Tip No.90: Incorporate a series of escalating problems to create tension. The movies “Jaws” and “Speed” are two classic examples.
Tip No.91: Help your young writers to ramp up the tension by experimenting with a series of short sentences.
Tip No.92: Show, don’t tell: https://suecowley.wordpress.com/2013/06/08/show-or-tell/.
Tip No.93: Explore the classic elements of different genres, and then show your students how to subvert them.
Tip No.94: Writing is an act of communication. Give your children someone to communicate with, and something to say.
Tip No.95: Writing is not about following a recipe or a formula. It is about an act of self-expression.
Tip No.96: Write for yourself, but write with your readers in mind.
Tip No.97: Only a reader can bring a piece of writing to life. Otherwise it is just squiggles on a page.
Tip No.98: The only way to get better at writing is to write.
Tip No.99: A well-known piece of advice for writers is “only ever use the word “said” to convey dialogue”.
Tip No.100: A child who will not or does not want to write, has little advantage over one who *cannot* write. Motivation is key.
Tip No.2: Technique and accuracy are important, but balance is vital. Leave time/space for expressive freedom.
Tip No.3: Marking is a form of editing. The end goal is to get people to edit their own writing by/for themselves.
Tip No.4: You can only write what you can say. Speaking really matters. Make talk a central part of your approach.
Tip No.5: Every time you speak in your classroom, you model talk for your students. Speak (mostly) as you want them to write.
Tip No.6: Chuck in the odd colloquialism or interesting turn of phrase, too. Show them how to play with language.
Tip No.7: When you give instructions, emphasise the time connectives, to show your students how these words sequence ideas.
Tip No.8: Use Q&A time to encourage students to develop their speaking – ask them to rephrase and elaborate their ideas.
Tip No.9: Use a variety of imaginary contexts in lessons, to show your children how people speak in different situations.
Tip No.10: Ask your students to listen in to how other people talk and to capture ‘snippets’ of interesting dialogue.
Tip No.11: Get your children to re-tell a familiar story to a partner. Fairytales work really well for this.
Tip No.12: Think creatively about using multi-sensory stimuli to inspire writing. Texture, light, nature, objects, plants.
Tip No.13: We often focus on the senses of touch, sight and hearing. Don’t forget to include taste and smell as well. ;)
Tip No.14: You wouldn’t do a physical activity without a warm-up; incorporate writing warm-ups into lessons as well.
Tip No.15: Use a ‘stream of consciousness’ as a quick warm-up. Focus on dumping what’s in your head, rather than on technique.
Tip No.16: Objects make a fantastic stimulus. Who *did* leave that suitcase in our classroom and what on earth is inside it?
Tip No.17: Ask your students to look at a photo, close their eyes, and then imagine walking around ‘inside’ the image.
Tip No.18: Music is a great stimulus for writing – use Greig’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” to inspire fantasy settings.
Tip No.19: Get your students to translate one sense into another – what is the sound of mint, or the taste of rain?
Tip No.20: Remove a sense to inspire writing – what can we hear or smell if we walk around blindfolded?
Tip No.21: Reading is a fantastic stimulus and support for writing. Read anything and everything is great advice.
Tip No.22: Weird titles make a great stimulus: The Day the Earth Stopped Turning or My Brother is an Alien.
Tip No.23: Share samples of children’s writing, using a visualiser. Show writing when it is still “hot off the press”.
Tip No.24: Experiment with a variety of surfaces for writing – windows, desks, tarmac, walls, cellophane, sand, clay.
Tip No.25: Learning to touch type is fantastically useful. It is an investment in time that is well worth making.
Tip No.26: Help your children invest in their writing by giving it as valid and authentic a sense of purpose as you can.
Tip No.27: Unless it’s a private diary, every piece of writing is written for an audience. Look for ‘real world’ audiences.
Tip No.28: Consider the size of the audience – the bigger the audience, often the greater the incentive to write well.
Tip No.29: Set up a class blog, and use challenges such as www.100wc.net and www.lendmeyourliteracy.com.
Tip No.30: Self publishing is pretty straightforward these days – publish your students’ writing via www.kdp.amazon.com.
Tip No.31: Play around with form and subvert expectations – write a ‘poem of complaint’ rather than a letter.
Tip No.32: Writing is physical, as well as intellectual. Use activities to build strength: cutting, threading, tearing.
Tip No.33: Get good handwriting habits in place early on – it’s much easier to build good habits than to break bad ones.
Tip No.34: Remember that children who are left-handed need to form their letters in a different way. See http://bit.ly/1Imusv5.
Tip No.35: Have high expectations about handwriting, but don’t limit self expression in a desire to encourage neatness.
Tip No.36: Don’t mistake neat handwriting for good ideas, or vice versa – it’s surprisingly easy to mix up the two.
Tip No.37: Focus on building children's hand and finger strength. You can find useful exercises here: http://www.rch.org.au/uploadedFiles/Main/Content/ot/InfoSheet_E.pdf.
Tip No.38: Watch out for poor pencil grip and correct this early on. Help your students develop a good ‘tripod grip’.
Tip No.39: Be fussy about posture when writing – children will spend an awful lot of time sitting writing at school.
Tip No.40: Help small children develop their phonological awareness with lots of listening activities. This helps reading/spelling too.
Tip No.41: Teach your students lots of strategies for learning spellings, rather than just giving them word lists to learn.
Tip No.42: Look for relationships between words to support spelling. Find groups of related words, such as one/once/only.
Tip No.43: Ask students to develop a ‘spelling voice’ for saying oddly spelled words in their heads (e.g. Feb-RU-ary).
Tip No.44: Etymology is not only a great way into spelling, it is also fascinating: explore the roots of words.
Tip No.45: To handle homophones, look for logical reasons for different spellings. ‘Their’ has ‘I’ in it and refers to you.
Tip No.46: Children often understand the theory behind punctuation, but still don’t use it properly. Motivation matters most.
Tip No.47: Talk about *why* punctuation matters – what does it actually do to our writing?
Tip No.48: To avoid full-stop-free writing, get your children to form each sentence in their heads before they write it down.
Tip No.49: To solve ‘exclamation mark disorder’, get your students to ration them. 1 per 1,000 words is more than enough.
Tip No.50: Show your children how *writing* can exclaim. We don’t actually need exclamation marks to do that for us.
Tip No.51: Translate speech bubbles into speech marks: the speech marks contain the words/punctuation, just like the bubbles.
Tip No.52: Make a ‘speech mark sandwich’ – punctuation goes inside the speech marks, just as ketchup goes inside the sandwich.
Tip No.53: We learn the grammar of our native tongue by speaking it. If children say ‘would of’, they will write ‘would of’.
Tip No.54: Remember that the reason grammar matters is because of what it *does*, not what it's *called*.
Tip No.55: Create your own pieces of writing to use in class – both ‘good’ examples, and ‘bad’ ones too.
Tip No.56: Pick apart the internal structures of other people’s writing, to show your students how structures work.
Tip No.57: Keep a record of the ‘history’ of a piece of writing, to show how structure is built up by the editing process.
Tip No.58: Encourage your children to think of writing as more like building a house, than going from A to B.
Tip No.59: As you model writing for your children, talk about the processes inside your head. What decisions do you make and why?
Tip No.60: Show your children snippets of text to identify forms.. How can they *tell* that these 5 words are in a news report?
Tip No.61: Use Pie Corbett’s story-mapping technique, to show your children how stories have an internal structure.
Tip No.62: Translate stories into diagrams, using symbols to demonstrate time, place, character, purpose.
Tip No.63: Do plenty of oral story-telling, so that the children internalise the way that writing is structured.
Tip No.64: Use an agreed set of marking symbols in writing books, to save yourself time.
Tip No.65: Include notes, diagrams and jottings in writing books, as well as chunks of text. Make it a working document.
Tip No.66: See marking as part of the process of *scrutiny*, rather than as something that the teacher does for the child.
Tip No.67: Scrutiny and self-editing should go on *during* the process of writing, and not just when the writing is ‘complete’.
Tip No.68: Remember that is a powerful and sometimes painful thing, to have your writing ‘marked’ and ‘corrected’.
Tip No.69: Show your children that you are a writer too. Share pieces of your writing with them, especially ones that didn’t go well.
Tip No.70: Sometimes, overcome your desire for evidence and *let your children do a piece of writing then throw it away*.
Tip No.71: Create fictional characters who leave behind slightly dodgy piece of writing that the children can examine..
Tip No.72: Balance the positive with the negative when marking – focus on keeping children’s writing confidence high.
Tip No.73: Collect samples of the writing that we do in real life – shopping lists, rough notes, etc. – to show its value/usefulness.
Tip No.74: Talk to your students about what their writing makes you *feel*, as well as what it makes you *think*.
Tip No.75: When you use colour coded marking techniques, share what the colours mean with parents as well as with students.
Tip No.76: Word choice is crucial for great writing, so get your students to really think about this. *Why* pick this specific word?
Tip No.77: Writing ‘style’ is about developing a unique writing ‘voice’. It was what moves writing from competent to great.
Tip No.78: The only way to improve your writing is to get it wrong, before you get it right.
Tip No.79: Experiment with taking on the voices of other writers – Jeff Kinney (the Wimpy Kid author) is fun to try.
Tip No.80: When you introduce figurative techniques such as metaphor, take care that your students don’t over-egg the pudding.
Tip No.81: Just because you know what a simile is, doesn’t mean you have to use one in every sentence.
Tip No.82: It’s important to learn the rules of writing, because then you can get to break them consciously.
Tip No.83: It can be fun to ban clichés and over-used words. I once met someone who held a funeral for the word ‘nice’ with a class.
Tip No.84: Develop metaphors in ‘sets’, for instance a ‘weather’ set. “Her face clouded over” or “his voice thundered”.
Tip No.85: Use topical events to freshen up your similes: “They fought like crazed politicians desperate to win the Referendum.”
Tip No.86: Draw abstract concepts, to help your children conceptualise them. For instance, drawing an “elephant in the room”.
Tip No.87: Engaging the reader is key, because if I don’t want to read what you wrote, I will stop reading.
Tip No.88: Play a game of ‘what is this sentence trying to do to me?’ Examine author intentions in great detail.
Tip No.89: The thing missing from most young writers’ stories, is dramatic tension. Look carefully at how writers develop this.
Tip No.90: Incorporate a series of escalating problems to create tension. The movies “Jaws” and “Speed” are two classic examples.
Tip No.91: Help your young writers to ramp up the tension by experimenting with a series of short sentences.
Tip No.92: Show, don’t tell: https://suecowley.wordpress.com/2013/06/08/show-or-tell/.
Tip No.93: Explore the classic elements of different genres, and then show your students how to subvert them.
Tip No.94: Writing is an act of communication. Give your children someone to communicate with, and something to say.
Tip No.95: Writing is not about following a recipe or a formula. It is about an act of self-expression.
Tip No.96: Write for yourself, but write with your readers in mind.
Tip No.97: Only a reader can bring a piece of writing to life. Otherwise it is just squiggles on a page.
Tip No.98: The only way to get better at writing is to write.
Tip No.99: A well-known piece of advice for writers is “only ever use the word “said” to convey dialogue”.
Tip No.100: A child who will not or does not want to write, has little advantage over one who *cannot* write. Motivation is key.