3 Practical Ways to Build Students’ Writing Stamina

When students say, “I’m done!,” teachers typically know otherwise. More often than not, students are not actually finished with the task at hand. When students have writing assignments, this frustrating refrain surfaces again and again as they wrap up their independent work.

I work in many elementary and middle school settings as a literacy consultant. I often hear many teachers say, “Add more details,” to get students to spend more time on their writing. The challenge with using this vague direction is that it usually leads student writers to add superfluous details to their work. They begin to repeat what they’ve already written, add in disconnected ideas, or shift away from their original focus in ways that confuse readers.

When teachers begin their writing units by discussing the concepts of genre, purpose, and audience (what I refer to as the concept of “G.P.A.”), they can help students produce more thoughtful and engaging pieces while also building their writing stamina.

1. Understanding Genre

Before students begin brainstorming or drafting sentences for a particular writing piece, they need to understand the ins and outs of that genre. When they see and hear many models within the chosen genre, students learn to understand common features and structures and can attempt to emulate them in their own writing. Sharing multiple models allows students to recognize patterns across a genre, which facilitates discussions about aberrations where authors make intentional choices.

This work is similar to the pre-teaching that teachers do before beginning a unit in social studies (sharing videos and creating stations to build background knowledge) or the vocabulary and inquiry conversations that take place before starting a new unit in science. This work around genre building gives students a better understanding of what they are supposed to craft, before they ever put a pen to paper.

Here are three questions to ask when students finish early to help them further contemplate aspects of genre:

Where do I clearly show what my piece is truly about? Identify the spots where this is evident for the reader. If the central idea isn’t present, add sentences that make the main idea/heart of your story obvious.

What mood do I want my reader to feel as they are reading my piece? Highlight the words/phrases that you used to evoke the mood. If the mood isn’t clear, add in/change specific verbs, adjectives, and adverbs to make it clearer.

What structure best matches the genre in which I am writing? Name the structural choices that you made and why they match the genre you’re writing in. Are there other structures that you can play around with to make your writing even more exciting?

2. Identifying The Purpose of Their Writing

When a school leader enters your classroom and inevitably asks a student, “Why are you writing…?” their answer shouldn’t be, “Because my teacher told me to.” This is not a purpose for writing. One thing I repeat over and over again when I’m working with teachers or student writers is, “Every decision that authors and illustrators make is made with intention.” I feel it’s critical to impart the idea that those decisions are all made with one thing in mind—a reader.

If modeling and instruction includes discussions about why authors make the moves they do and how it affects their readers, students will venture into their own writing with more knowledge, confidence, and understanding of what their purpose is when they begin to make their own decisions about their readers.

These questions can be helpful for early finishers in connection to their purpose for writing:

What do I want my readers to know when they have finished reading my work? Write down one or two things that you hope readers walk away with from your piece. What do you hope they learn, feel, understand, want, or ponder when they read your last line?

What purposeful choices am I making in my work, and how do they affect my reader? Which literary devices are you using? What do you hope readers will feel or imagine as they read? Make your verbs, nouns, and adjectives more precise. Change the ones that are vague or basic to ensure that they fit the purpose of your writing.

3. Knowing Who Their Audience IS

Discussing the concept of an author’s audience can be a very powerful tool that aids students in making more informed decisions about their writing. The word audience can be defined as the one who engages with a particular type of text. Have students search your classroom or school library for different types of text: chapter books, textbooks, magazines, poems, notices from an administrator, posters, lunch menus, etc. With a careful eye, explore how each example was crafted to suit a particular audience. Once an audience is determined, discuss how certain elements of the texts are different based on the audience for whom they were written.

When students believe that they’re done with an assignment, have them attend to the following concepts focused on the audience.

• If appropriate, think about changing your font (bold print, capital letters, smaller print, various fonts, different colored fonts) to engage your audience.
• Keeping your audience in mind, is your writing style consistent? Formal writing should include full sentences, words and numbers under 10 spelled out, more serious tones, sophisticated vocabulary, third-person point of view, etc. Informal writing can include fragments, slang, contractions, first-person point of view, etc.
• Is the way that you lay out your text and visuals one that your reader can easily move through? Consider the placement of the text on pages and layout, how text features and illustrations interact with the text.
• Do the words you have chosen match your audience? Are you using words that are familiar to your audience, or should you define certain terms somewhere in the text to help them understand your meaning? Add definitions in context, use an appositive phrase, include parenthetical definitions, and think about using an “or” to share an alternative definition.
• Are the words you’re using too simple for your audience? Should you make your text more sophisticated? Be more precise (“big” to “humongous”), trade simple verbs for more active or descriptive verbs (“looked” to “glanced”), use figurative language.

In my article “Guiding Students to Consider Their Reader When Writing,” I discuss how responding to a piece of student writing as either “effective for a reader” or “confusing for a reader” during conferences is a more compelling way to help students grow as writers. The author’s intent should serve as the consistent lens through which we provide feedback and evaluate student work.

Keeping genre, purpose, and audience at the center of writing instruction all year can be a critical shift in helping students to make more thoughtful and purposeful choices both when they analyze the writing of others and when they begin to craft their own writing pieces.