The Writing Revolution

A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades

Judith C. Hochman, Natalie Wexler

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119364979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Why you need a writing revolution in your classroom and how to lead it

The Writing Revolution (TWR) provides a clear method of instruction that you can use no matter what subject or grade level you teach. The model, also known as The Hochman Method, has demonstrated, over and over, that it can turn weak writers into strong communicators by focusing on specific techniques that match their needs and by providing them with targeted feedback.

Insurmountable as the challenges faced by many students may seem, The Writing Revolution can make a dramatic difference. And the method does more than improve writing skills. It also helps:

• Boost reading comprehension
• Improve organizational and study skills
• Enhance speaking abilities
• Develop analytical capabilities

The Writing Revolution is as much a method of teaching content as it is a method of teaching writing. There's no separate writing block and no separate writing curriculum. Instead, teachers of all subjects adapt the TWR strategies and activities to their current curriculum and weave them into their content instruction.

But perhaps what's most revolutionary about the TWR method is that it takes the mystery out of learning to write well. It breaks the writing process down into manageable chunks and then has students practice the chunks they need, repeatedly, while also learning content.

Chapter 1
Sentences
The Basic Building Blocks of Writing

If you were building a house, would you start with the roof? Probably not. But for far too long, I was attempting to do just that with my writing assignments.

A student I'll call Roger was in the eighth grade—well past the point where he should have learned to write a good, clear sentence. But somehow, he was still struggling to produce one. Some of his sentences continued on and on—maybe with a comma where there should have been a period, maybe with no punctuation whatsoever—trailing off only when he seemed to run out of energy. At other times, his sentences were short and dull, each repeating the same simple structure. Sometimes his “sentences” lacked a subject or a verb. Sometimes I had no idea what he was trying to say.

But Roger was in the eighth grade, and so I felt I had to assign him—and his classmates who were having similar problems—paragraphs and compositions to write. When I returned these written pieces to Roger, I would point out the run-on sentences, the fragments, the sentences that didn't say much of anything, and ask him to do better next time. But it didn't seem to make any difference. The next time I assigned Roger a paragraph or a composition, the same sentence-level problems would stubbornly appear.

Eventually I realized that if I wanted my students to write good paragraphs and compositions, I was going to need to start building a solid foundation first—just the way I would start building a house. And in writing, that foundation consists of sentences.

The importance of spending plenty of instructional time working with sentences can't be stressed enough. Sentence-level work is the engine that will propel your students from writing the way they speak to using the structures of written language. Once they begin to construct more sophisticated sentences, they'll enhance not only their writing skills but also their reading comprehension.¹ And sentence-level work will lay the groundwork for your students' ability to revise and edit when they tackle longer forms of writing.

Clearly, not all sentences are the same. Some are far more informative, complex, and interesting to read than others. Many students, when asked to compose a sentence, are likely to write something like this:

The Union Army won.

The goal of TWR sentence-level strategies and the activities that support them are to enable students to write something more like this:

In April 1865, the Union Army, a well-trained and well-equipped force, won a decisive battle against the Confederates at the Battle of Appomattox Court House.

The second expanded sentence has an appositive and is expanded to answer the questions where, when and why. If you teach all of these elements explicitly through TWR sentence-level strategies, it will enable your students to construct far more sophisticated and informative responses.

The second sentence also demonstrates far more content knowledge than the first one—content knowledge that students can express only if they're actually learning it. When giving students any writing assignment, including those at the sentence level, first ensure that your students have sufficient knowledge or resources at their disposal to write intelligently about the subject at hand. That means you'll need to figure out in advance what you want your students to understand as a result of the activity and plan backward from that goal.²

Make It Correct: Using Sentence Activities to Teach Grammar and Conventions

As we've mentioned, your best bet for teaching your students the grammar and conventions of English is to do it in the context of their writing. And the best way to do that is through sentence activities. If you wait until they're writing paragraphs and compositions, the number of mechanical errors can be overwhelming, for you and for your students. Of course we don't expect students to master all the conventions of written English at once, but there's no reason to hold off on gradually introducing the rudiments.

If you're working with Level 1 students, you may need to start by teaching them to begin each sentence with a capital letter and end it with a period. As your students progress, you can introduce the use of question marks and exclamation points. Once they have a grasp of those conventions, you can begin to focus on the capitalization of proper nouns.

When introducing students to the first subordinating conjunctions they'll encounter—before, after, if, and when—show them that the comma should go after the dependent clause at the beginning of the sentence. For example:

Before I go to bed, I always brush my teeth.

A subordinating conjunction introduces a dependent (subordinate) clause and signals the relationship between that clause and the main idea. Subordinating conjunctions are often used in written language, and they are more likely to appear at the beginning of a sentence in writing than in speech.

For example, in the sentence, “Although it is raining, I'm going to take a walk,” the subordinating conjunction is although. Together with “it is raining...