The complexity of writing

Writing is a complex process which does not develop naturally in the same way that spoken language does.  Writing is a craft that needs time and explicit practice to develop and hone.

We don't expect everyone to be a great painter or sculptor but we expect all children to be great writers.  Often in schools, we expect children to write well, long before they have sufficient knowledge or skills to write proficiently.

Through history people have communicated in a wide range in ways through storytelling, songs, paintings, arts and crafts, plays and dance. For a long time only few people were able to write, as it was considered to be difficult skill to master.  Now in our modern world we want everyone to write and from a very early age.  We forget how challenging writing can be and that many people are better suited to other forms of communication. Of course writing is an important skill for most jobs and to function in our daily lives we need to be able to write.  But for many the writing proficiency needed for eveyday life is very different from the complex creative writing required at school. 

Too often we wrongly equate the ability to write with intelligence.  If a child is verbally capable we expect them to be able to translate this easily to writing.  We forget that writing is not a natural process but is something we need to train our brain to do. It also involves learning many different processes from letter formation to spelling,  which in English involves both mastering phonics and spelling rules and learning many irregular high frequency by sight. In addition, we have to develop our vocabulary and we need to be a able to remember an idea while we compose a sentence. Finally we have to consider the purpose of the writing and know the features of that genre.

We also think that reading and writing go hand in hand and that if someone can read something they can write the same thing.  However they do not develop at the same rate, learning to write is significantly harder. It requires us to master many different skills and use them together.  Reading is decoding where we decipher what is actually there but writing in encoding we have to draw on what is in our own head to make marks on the page. Being faced with a blank page can be very daunting,  even for adults.

Giving time for each skill to develop and become automatic is important if children are going to become good writers.  Many schools rush to get children to write independently before some of the basic skills are secure. This is one of the reasons that writing can be so daunting for dyslexic students. They typically need more time to develop their letter formation. They can have difficulty controlling the pencil and remembering starting point and the sequence for each letter.  They also need explicit teaching over several years to learn common letter patterns or to remember high frequency words. They do not just pick the spellings by seeing them in texts or writing them out 3 times. When so much energy goes into these basic skills, there is little energy left for composing the sentence or thinking about interesting vocabulary.

Another challenge for dyslexic children is having a weak working memory, this can make it hard to keep a sentence in their head while they write it down.  Typically they will forget the sentence half way through or they will miss out words.  Correct punctuation can also be a challenge if you can not keep a whole sentence in your head.

The key to helping dyslexic children is trying to reduce the number of skills being used at once and fully appreciating how hard they are working to perform basic tasks. In addition it is vital that they receive regular explicit practice of weaker skills outside of the regular writing lessons.  There are many ways to help depending on their stage of development.

If they are still struggling with letter formation then an adult could scribe their ideas or they could label picture rather than write sentences.  Regular practice of letter formation can be done separately using tactile materials like waxy doodles and playdough, finger writing in a salt tray or on sandpaper help to develop the muscle memory, rhymes can also be use to help remember the sequence for each letter.

To support spelling they should be encouraged to make phonetic approximations in line with the phonetic they have been taught. They should be given the spelling of words that are beyond their spelling level. They should also be given word lists of task specific words and high frequency words. Spelling should not be corrected during a writing task but common errors can be noted by the adult and be worked another time with multi sensory methods.

Another way to support writing is for an adult to act as their working memory.  The child verbally rehearses the sentence and then the adult reminds them of their idea a  word at time. Talk tins which record a sentence at a time and can be replayed by the child can help older students remember their ideas.

The use of assistive technology is also very helpful in allowing a child to write at their intellectual level while their other skills develop.  There are many voice to text apps and programs that allow children to turn their verbal ideas into text. Word processing can also be easier for some children where a lot of energy is taken up by the physical process of writing.  Programs like Kidspiration can help with the organisation and sequencing of ideas which can be another area of challenge for dyslexic children.

Finally we need time, understanding and patience so that writing skills can develop at the child's pace rather than the school's pace.