Provide Structure and Assisted Practice with Longer Writing Tasks

Although we are definite believers in alternatives to paper-and-pencil tasks for assessing students' learning, we also know that if they don't learn to write, their academic careers are going to be long and painful indeed. We have worked with many students whose hatred of writing resulted in them becoming master escape artists of any written academic work. Although we often modified assignments and provided alternatives to writing when appropriate, we also required our students to journal every single day in order to get more practice with the difficult skill of writing. We provided them with a great deal of structure and support during this activity because few could experience success with writing if we had just given them a journal topic or said, "Write in your journal."

Using the following strategies, we have seen many students go from being writing haters to truly enjoying the process or at least tolerating it without any major behavioral meltdowns.

Start Small and Build Success

With extreme writing haters, start by requiring just one sentence and not requiring appropriate spelling or spacing. Once the student experiences success with the one sentence, advance to requiring appropriate spacing, then correct spelling, and then increasing sentence length and number of sentences per entry. The key is setting your expectation just slightly above where the student is currently successful and building slowly from there so the student continues to feel successful and therefore increasingly confident.

Talk Through the Idea First

Many students experience chronic writer's block, and although they can talk your ear off, they suddenly have nothing to say when it comes to putting pencil to paper. Simply starting a conversation with them by asking questions such as, "What did you do this weekend?" or "Tell me what you know about dinosaurs" (or some other area of special interest) can help get around this obstacle. After a few sentences, stop them, repeat what they said, and have them write it down on paper. You may have to repeat each sentence several times or say the sentence one word at a time and have them write the word immediately after you have said it. Another strategy is to have them talk into a tape recorder and then play it back and write their words down, rewinding when needed.

Require Sentences to Have More Than Seven Words

Students who hate to write often come up with very short, boring sentences such as, "I like dinosaurs." That's a start, but we have found that requiring more than seven words in a sentence results in the use of more descriptive and complex language such as, "I like green dinosaurs that ate plants." Once students have mastered writing sentences with seven words, you can increase the required number of words per sentence or sentences per journal entry.

Chunk and Check

When working with writing haters, never wait to give feedback until they have finished the entire assignment. Nothing is more discouraging to a student who thought she had completed a task she found excruciating than having to go back and correct it (a good example of a triggering antecedent). Break the assignment into small parts and check after each part, giving feedback and requiring corrections after each chunk. A good rule of thumb is to shoot for giving feedback about every ten to fifteen minutes, so base the size of each chunk on the work pace and abilities of the individual student.