THE WRITING CYCLE
Each writer has his or her own herky-jerky, highly personalized, often ritualized way of getting words onto paper. Any one-size-fits-all writing process would be not only inaccurate but destructive to students.
We don’t want to teach our students the writing process; rather, we want each one of them to find a process that works for him or her. This process will inevitably differ from student to student.
While you can learn from the drawing in figure 6-1, it doesn’t convey the fact that the writing process it self is messy and non linear. We describe it in separate consecutive stages, but the fact is that writers move fluidly in and out of these stages. For example, a student might be working on a rough draft but suddenly stop to brainstorm the shape of the story being written. And some students will skip one of the stages altogether.
With that important reminder, let’s slow down the process and explore the various stages writers go through.
1. PREWRITING (tahap sebelum tulisan)
Many writers consider prewriting an important part of their writing process. Prewriting, also called rehearsal or brainstorming, includes all the cognitive warm-up work that precedes the actual writing. The term sounds formal and intimidating, but that’s misleading. Athletes warm up by stretching their muscles; every writer has his or her own way of warming up to the task of writing. Look at this classroom scene:
Drew is jotting down a list of words in his writer’s notebook
Alix confers with Rhonda about a story she wants to write
David sits on the rug, paging through poetry books, looking for an idea
Josh sits at his desk, biting his eraser. There are no words on his paper. He’s thinking, planning his story in his head
All these students are prewriting. There are countless ways of rehearsing for writing. But too often in school the prewriting stage becomes a rigid routine. Instead of kids getting to choose how they want to rehearse for a piece of writing, all students are required to begin by making a cluster web, story map, outline, graphic organizer.
Prewriting should be a help, not a burden, for writers in school. You’ll want to show your students various ways they can rehearse their writing. But in the end, let them decide which one, if any, they find most helpful to their writer’s notebook for the rehearsing, planning, sketching, and wondering that characterizes this early writing stage. With its focus on thinking, dreaming, and gathering, the notebook encourages kids to “live like a writer” during all the hours outside the actual writing workshop. It is important to note that while students do lots of early writing in the notebook, this is an open-ended, generative, playful kind of writing-not the formalized prewriting ordained by a teacher.
2. ROUGH DRAFTING
Fluency, along with risk taking, is the foundation of a writing workshop. We want to get them moving. Don murray says that writing should be like riding a bike down a hill, bouncing along, going fast.
But most kids don’t write very fast. With few exceptions, students have only a fraction of their oral fluency when they write. And when they start looking up words in the dictionary, spell checker, or thesaurus, that meager fluency trickles downt to almost nothing. This is frustrating for students. A boy is mentally on the second paragraph of his story, but his hand has written only one sentence.
There are ways to increase writing fluency. Skilled writers learn to separate composing (drafting) from transcription (editing). In a writing workshop we encourage students to concentrate on getting a chunk of text onto the paper. They need to see what the messy rough drafts of professional writers look like. And they should put away editing tools during this stage.
Although we want kids to feel free to compose fluently, this does not mean we should encourage sloppy habits while students are rough drafting. Regie Routman, author of Invitations and other books on literacy, points out that it is reasonable to expect even first-grade kids to spell certain words correctly words correctly during the drafting stage. We recently worked with one teacher who had replaced the term “sloppy copy” with “best first draft” to describe what she expected from her students during this stage.
3. REVISING
Read some books on writing process and you might get the idea that kids like nothing better than to revise their writing. Let’s be blunt: most kids are not eager to revise. They assume an I’ve-done-it-and-now-I’m-done-with-it attitude toward their writing. There are several reasons for this. First, they often think of revision can be a way to enhance a good one. “If I write something that interests me, I go back,” the poet William Stafford once said. “if it doesn’t interest me, I go on.”
We shouldn’t force students to revise, but we can show them the alternatives to consider when revising their writing. Here are some revisions I (Ralph) do when I write:
Change the beginning
Change the ending
Add a section (layering)
Delete a part (pruning)
Change the order (resequencing)
Change the genre
Change the point of view
Change the tone
Change the tense
Slow down the “hot spot”
Focus on one part
Break a large piece into chunks or chapters
While students may not do everything that a professional writer can, we can help them expand their repertoire of revision strategies. As you suggest ideas for revision during minilessons, writing conferences, and share time, keep these things in mind:
Don’t expect them to revise everything. The student should decide what adpect or part of the piece to revise. However, it’s reasonable for you to expect students to go through the revision process from time to time
Make sure they understand the difference between revision and editing. Construct a brick wall between the two! Revision is a composing tool; editing involves the surface features of the writing. If kids confuse the two, their revisions will be first aid (corrections) instead of the radical surgery that leads to improved writing
Link revision with what you teach about craft. If you use a picture book to model a strong lead, for example, suggest that students revisit their writing to see if they might sharpen their lead. Whenever you teach kids about writing-details, strong characters, setting-you give them a new way to look at their own writing.
Model how a particular revision enhanced your own writing. Put a series of drafts on an overhead to show your own revision process to students
Be patient. Try not to get frustrated if you don’t see as much revision as you’d like. When you’re working with young writers, it goes with the territory
4. EDIT (PROOFREADING)
If the tone is right, your students will feel comfortable enough to share their writing with you and your students in the safety of your workshop. But you should also encourage them to seek a wider audience for their writing. When you publish the writing, you need to make sure the writing will be “reader-friendly”’, as nancie atwell has said. This includes making sure the conventions of language are used correctly. Teachers should not corner the market when it comes to checking for errors. We need to let kids in on the action and help them see when it is appropriate to proofread.
You may want your students to write for three or four weeks without obsessing about spelling and grammar. But at some point you’ll want to introduce the idea of proofreading. In chapter 8 we take a close look at how to teach student writers the editing process.
If you are concerned that kids are not taking editing seriously, take a good look at possible ways for them to publish what they’ve written. Editing matters when we go from private to public writing. If kids don’t have real opportunities to go public, there’s no compelling reason for them to proofread their work.
5. PUBLISHING
Writing is a form of communication. We write to many different people for a variety of purposes. Some writing is too personal too or revealing to be shared. But we want our kids to have the experience of seeing their words fly beyond the confines of their notebooks or finished-writing folders. We want them to see that writing does real work in the real world.
When your kids seek an audience for their writing, do whatever you can to make this experience as authentic and purposeful as possible. During the Persian gulf war, millions of U.S. children wrote letters to the soldiers in the Middle East. But the purpose and the audience for this writing was determined by teachers. We think it’s important for kids to find their own purposes and audiences for their writing. This might include when a student:
Sends a letter to grandma
Puts together a collection of grandpa’s best war stories
Writes a play and presents it to kids in another class
Writes to a best friend who moved away
Creates a “how to tame a baby” brochure with practical tips for kids who want to earn money baby-sitting
Publishing with our youngest writers brings its own challenges. If you’re working with primary children, you might think of two kinds of publishing: formal and informal. Formal publishing (involving standardized spelling, grammar, and punctuation) has its place even for kindergarten writers. We don’t ask primary writers to recopy their stories. But with your help they can create correctly spelled books that everyone can read.
Expecting the emerging writer to publish with correct spelling and grammar is a little bit like asking a three-year-old to speak perfectly or not at all. One way to honor children’s writing is to create classrooms that reflect what they can do. That’s why we encourage “informal publishing”-putting students’ work up on the wall exactly as they wrote it, with their own drawings, inventive spellings, and so on. It would make sense to see less formal publishing, and lots of informal publishing, in kindergarten and first grade. In second grade the teacher might gradually expect more formal publishing from students.
THE IMPORTANCE OF REREADING
Rereading is the glue that connects the stages of writing. Writers continually reread what they’ve written, and this rereading changes at each stage of the craft cycle. Picture Chelsea, a fourth grader. After Chelsea has completed the first paragraph or page of her story, she rereads it and asks herself, “is this any good? Should I be writing this?”
Reading her piece convinces Chelsea that it is pretty good, worth continuing. She keeps writing. After finishing the first draft, Chelsea rereads a second time. This time she asks, “Does this make sense? Have I left anything out? Does my beginning grab my reader?”
Notice that these are big composing questions-not questions about grammar or mechanics-that drive the revision process. Later, Chelsea looks over her story, wondering if she should publish. She decides that she should. Now Chelsea rereads it yet again. This time she looks for errors that involve spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or words she left out.
Rereading is crucial, and too many students don’t pay attention to it. If you teach kids nothing about writing all year, teach them how to reread their writing. We tell students, “you should be the best expert in the world on your own writing, and the way to do that is by rereading it over as you write.”
As the year goes on you’ll look for different ways to stretch your writers. You’ll explore the elements of good writing. You’ll move from personal narrative to other genres of writing-nonfiction, poetry, fiction-that will each bring their own challenges. But at the same time you’ll continue to explore the writing cycle with students. And you’ll try to depen their understanding of all the moves writers make to bring their words alive.
Helping each student find an effective process of writing should be a crucial part of your writing curriculum. The cycle described in this chapter applies to all kinds of writing. We suggest that you present it to your students not as here’s something brand new but as here’s something you’re already doing in your writing, and I’m going to suggest ways you can do it even better.
Making It Work in the Classroom
Begin your own writer’s notebook and commit to using it, even it only for ten minutes a day
Use the thoughts generated in your notebook to develop one piece of writing that you could share with students. Save drafts and revisions to show students
Reflect on your own writer’s process. What are you learning about yourself as a writer that you could share with students?
As you move around the classroom during the writing workshop, pay attention to where each student is in the writing cycle
Ask students to share their writing process with the class. Help them become aware of how these process may differ from student to student
REFERENSI
Ralph Fletcher and joAnn Portalupi, Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide, Heinemann, Portsmouth, 2001
