Writing.... Insights from www.allkindsofminds.org By Dr. Michael Levine.... READ THIS STUFF, Students! So much is riding on writing. Not only must school-age writers transcribe their thoughts neatly, but they must also respond productively to the call for excellent language skill, rich idea development, and the arrangement of ideas and facts in a logical order. In some cases that call goes unanswered. Large numbers of students falter and fail when it comes to writing. Their writing may be barely legible, the content overly simplistic, or they may simply write too little. Their written language may seem like the verbal expression of a much younger student. Sometimes there is a wide gap between the sophistication of a student's spoken language and the language he transmits on paper. Some kids simply resist writing activities altogether. A range of possible neurodevelopmental dysfunctions can impede the acquisition of writing skills. Six forms of dysfunction are especially common in students with deficient writing: 1) graphomotor; 2) memory; 3) language, 4) attention; 5) organization; 6) ideation. A discussion of these potential breakdown points follows. Graphomotor Challenges (Difficulty using their fingers) Students with graphomotor problems may simply find that their fingers cannot keep pace with the flow of ideas and language coming from their minds. Letter formation may be a slow and laborious process; they may write symbols that are difficult to decipher or inconsistently legible. Some students may have problems coordinating their finger muscles so that they operate in the correct sequences to form letters, or may have trouble determining which task each muscle must do when writing. Others may find it hard to track the position of their fingers as they write; they get lost in the middle of letters. Often kids with graphomotor problems grip their pencils awkwardly, which may make letter formation even harder for them. Memory Challenges Memory problems are often an unrecognized cause of writing difficulty. In fact, writing requires more memory than just about anything else a student is asked to do in school. Writers need to simultaneously retrieve spelling, punctuation, capitalization and letter formation rules, vocabulary and content information, transitions and connections, and all the other ingredients of written output. Some students have serious problems with this simultaneous draw on memory, and as a result, make many mistakes when writing. All too often, they come to believe that writing just isn't worth the effort. Other kids have writing difficulty that stems from weaknesses related to active working memory, the part of memory that allows them to keep track of immediately relevant information while doing a task. These students tend to forget aspects of the writing tasks while they are writing. For example, while trying to decide where to put a comma, such a student may lose track of her ideas for the next sentence. Language Challenges Clearly, writing is one of the most stringent tests of language ability. Students who have trouble expressing themselves orally are apt to have even greater difficulty when they try to use language on paper. Their writing may seem ungrammatical or too elementary. Sometimes these frustrated young writers react to their language limitations by reducing, i.e., "dumbing down" the quality of their ideas so they can express them more easily. These students' writing products are rarely representative of their true knowledge and thinking skills. Attention Challenges Good attention control is crucial for writing. Getting thoughts on paper requires sustained concentration, strong planning, and careful self-monitoring. These are demands that exceed the capacities of students with attention deficits. It is not surprising therefore that a high percentage of these students seem to reject writing. They are apt to produce written output that is highly inconsistent in both quality and volume. They may make frequent, careless mistakes and have particular problems with the mechanical details of writing such as punctuation, grammar and spelling. Ideation Challenges The ability to generate good ideas represents yet another writing necessity. Sadly, some kids have trouble brainstorming or thinking creatively or critically. They may find it hard to generate writing topics. They may lack the ability or the training to develop ideas and elaborate on their thinking. Consequently, their writing may be highly naïve and uninteresting. Organization Challenges Writing is fundamentally an organizational task. Before the actual writing process begins, a student first needs to get organized to complete the assignment by breaking the task down into steps, managing time, and pulling together all needed materials, writing implements, paper, reference books, etc. Then, while writing, the student needs to organize his ideas in the best possible order to create a coherent story or report. Students who have trouble organizing materials, time, and their thought processes are likely to create stream of consciousness writing, stating ideas in the order they come to mind. They may also procrastinate and miss deadlines, or do work at the very last minute. Additionally, such students can be overwhelmed by the need to keep track of the various writing tools and materials. Be Specific Helping a student overcome a writing problem or improve a particular writing skill requires an understanding of his specific breakdown. Take the case of a student whose written work is limited or primitive, for example. Without knowing whether the problem is due to a poor pen or pencil grip or letter formation difficulties, an inability to remember facts, a breakdown in organizational ability, or issues involving one or more of the other neurodevelopmental ingredients of writing, it's impossible to determine the appropriate course of action. How to Teach Communication Skills By Dr. Michael Levine www.allkindsofminds.org Whatever career pathway a child ultimately embarks upon, one set of brain functions will inevitably play a role in fostering success. These are the functions that band together and result in optimal communication skills. Good communication cements working relationships, social interactions, and leadership capacities. Just as important but much less obvious is the fact that excellent communication helps one to clarify one's own thinking about things. There's an old saying, "How can I know what I think until I hear what I say?" How true! But that might mean that if you have trouble expressing your ideas, your understanding of those ideas runs the risk of being incomplete or vague. The most common and disabling communication gaps are seen in kids with expressive language dysfunctions. Their weaknesses take several different forms. There are some students who have trouble with words; either it is hard for them to find the words they need when they need them (so-called expressive dysphasia) or they simply possess inadequately developed vocabularies. In the latter case, a student has trouble learning and incorporating into her speech newly acquired words. Other students have trouble with sentence formulation. This is a big problem in elementary schools. A child may know what he's like to say but then have serious problems constructing a grammatically correct sentence to convey his thoughts. Such trouble may make him reluctant to speak or it could cause him to "dumb down" his ideas to fit them into a simple sentence. What a shame! Still other students meet frustration at the discourse levels of language, verbal output that has to go beyond the boundaries of sentences - into extensive explanations, narrations, and recapitulations. They are apt to have trouble organizing their thoughts in a logical sequence. Often such students reveal conspicuous difficulty with verbal elaboration; they simply don't elaborate on much of anything. Instead, they overutilize brief responses to questions or else just say they don't know (when they do know). Extended responses take too much work on their part and too often the final verbal product is deficient; so they "shut down" verbally. Teachers and parents can identify students with expressive language dysfunctions. When they speak on a literate subject they show excessive hesitancy, a lack of variation in sentence structure, less fluency than other kids (i.e., more hesitation and more effort expended), and a tendency to use only very common vocabulary (no abstract, academic, or technical terminology). Such students are seriously at risk for academic and perhaps career difficulty. Even the subtlest problems with expressive language can have dramatic ripple effects creating serious damage for students throughout the curriculum. It is important to recognize that some students have excellent social language abilities but weak literate language function. That means a student may be quite fluent and adept when it comes to communicating with peers on the bus but inept in a classroom discussion on medieval religious beliefs. The opposite also prevails sometimes. A student may display excellent academic verbal function but have trouble communicating on a social plane. Such verbal pragmatic dysfunction's can cause a student to be unpopular or even actively rejected by peers because he says the wrong things at the wrong time, talks in a manner that sounds hostile or excessively boastful, and has trouble using the words and sentence constructions that are fashionable with his fellow students. And some students with social skill shortcomings actually display problems with nonverbal communication. Their body movements and the images they project, the way they market themselves, may communicate negative vibes to their peers. Most often the kid emitting such signals is totally unaware of the extent to which he is alienating the other children. In school a significant amount of communication comes forth on paper. Writing is a critical skill, one that actually helps kids develop their communication skills. Unlike speaking, writing is a relatively slow process, one that allows for revision, for constant sanding and polishing. Written communication allows students to organize discourse, vary sentence structure, and do some rich elaborating on their thoughts. But writing is an enormous academic strain for some students, especially those with graphomotor dysfunctions or significant weaknesses of attention, language, or memory function. Many such students despise the act of writing, which is too bad, since they are the ones who most need to write as away of enhancing their thinking. Communication within academic settings is not confined to the verbal domain. Many students benefit from having available certain non-verbal channels of communication. They can find expression through creative activities. A student may communicate through art or dance or music. Some combine verbal ability with creativity as they write poetry, stories, or skits. Still others like to communicate through humor of various types. It is safe to say that every child needs to have at least one (and preferably more than one) mode of communication that works really effectively for her. Adults need to find those gratifying and satisfying outlets for every child. Finally, there is one other form of communication that is vitally important for kids, and that is the opportunity to communicate to caring adults one's true feelings. The communication of feelings - feelings of worry, anxiety, apprehension, and glee - need to be vented by kids in a setting that's safe. Parents and teachers should let children know that they can communicate how they are feeling inside without fear of reprisals, criticism, or public humiliation. ---------------------------------------- Notice to students If youwant a short workshop or tutorial about how to make a web page, go to INSTRUCTIONS. If you have questions, write to me at englishlesson@mail.com Mr. McCrea Web Page Educator "Mister McMath" |
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| This page is called: Writing GO to Tutor Read these tips about writing... May 16, 2003 Dennis Baron Chronicle of Higher Education The main goals in writing is engaging the reader in an interesting conversation. Can you tell me something that happened today or last year that you thought was interesting? Good. Start writing about it. Dennis Baron (a writing professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) ends his composition like this: Every day writing does not follow the standard essay with 5 paragraphs. Everyday writing does not follow a formula. It changes shapes it uses tactics that are sensitive to the context (the tactic changes when you try to use it in another situation)... It helps to give specific details about your life when you discuss your favorite places to eat, but a reader who wants specific details about the "best country in the world" might not need to know about you. Your check list: 1. Give me your opinion 2. Don't make it abstract -- give me specific details. 3. Don't give me too many details. 4. The reader is not stupid. Don't explain everything. 5 Get to the point. 6. Make it interesting -- we're having a conversation. Check list for making a web site more interesting and readable... 1. Include visuals. 2. Make some of the sentences BOLD to help the scanning reader to find the important points. 3. Create a two-column page -- the distance for the eye to move is shorter on a Reader's Digest page or on a newspaper column than in a typical textbook. 4. Get an easy-to-remember name for your web site and your email address. You can buy an inexpensive domain name from www.godaddy.com for $8, then pay for FORWARDING (usually under $10). The web page can be hosted at oocities.com at no charge (click here to learn how to make a web page using oocities.com). 5. Your email address tells a lot about you. Do you expect a respectable business person to have any of these email addresses? jimmybaby3@hotmail.com or jzhotlips39@yahoo.com or surfingdude35@explode.com Suggestion: Do not use anything that you would not expect to find on a professional web site. Would a mayor of your city receive mail at youaremine111@yahoo.com? 6. Remember that you are writing for a wide audience. Some people are VISUAL and others are SOCIAL learners. Some of your readers learn by moving and others learn by DOING. Your writing can catch their attention. Don't be afraid to create a table for data. www.knowyourtype.com is an interesting web site for learning more about other ways of learning...If you can get inside the heads of people who learn in a different way, then you can write in a style that will reach them. 7. Change the size of type to catch the reader's attention... Do you want help in setting up your web site? Write to me: analyst@comcast.net Long distance consulting is possible... |
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