Stress Relief for the Writing Process

We know that writing can be a real struggle for many students. We also know that many parents and students appreciate the  Essentials in Writing program by Mathew Stevens. In fact this is often one of my top recommendations for teaching writing. The short video teaching that accompanies each lesson takes the pressure off the parent/teacher and provides great guided practice to the writing process. This week we are pleased to share the following article from Matthew on the importance of the planning process for students working on a writing assignment.

My students know that I'm adamant about planning. I think planning any written composition is one of the most overlooked steps in the writing process. I fully believe that proper planning can not only aid in creating excellent compositions but also relieve a lot of writing stress for reluctant writers.



Overall Plan
By first completing an overall plan, students can think in general terms. It's time to think about and record the main ideas of a composition using a graphic organizer. What is it that you really want to say? And how will you support that main idea? Best of all, it's a quick process and is painless.

 

Detailed Plan

Next, by completing a detailed plan students can focus primarily on the content of the composition. This is a time to focus on all the details of what the composition will communicate without the stress of writing a paper. Using a graphic organizer for each part of the composition, will help students to focus on short phrases of quality content. Notices I did not say quality sentences. A detailed plan should be short phrases of content that focuses on the main idea and subsequent details that support the main idea. By composing the content in short phrases in a planner, students are able to only think about content. This relieves the stress of trying to focus on the content and effective communication strategies. Best of all, it's not a long drawn out process but rather quick, easy, and painless (well...for most).


The drafting process then becomes a breeze. Not only do students have the content already prepared, now they can think about how to effectively communicate that content. They can focus on quality sentence structures, a variety of sentence structures, effective word choice, and so on.

Gifted writers can typically formulate mental plans and draft all at the same time. I've found, however, that most students are not gifted writers and prefer separate planning and drafting sessions. Breaking a composition into two planning sessions apart from the drafting process, is an effective process that is quick, easy and painless.

  

Happy Writing ~

Matthew