Archive for Writing

Kids Can Publish University is an organization that promotes literacy and a love for writing and illustrating through free monthly contests that reward winners with a published byline.

Children can enter writing or drawing assignments they’ve already done for their classrooms or create something new for the contest, and they can enter as often as they wish. Each month, Kids Can Publish selects the best pieces in each age divisions to publish online.

For more information on how children can enter the contest, visit the Kids Can Publish website.

The writing skills of 8th- and 12th-grade students in the United States improved in 2007 compared to earlier assessment years, with gains across many student groups, according to data released today by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

According to The Nation's Report Card: Writing 2007, the average writing score for 8th graders in 2007 was 3 points higher than in 2002 and 6 points higher than in 1998, and the percentage of students performing at or above the Basic level increased from 85% in 2002 to 88% in 2007. At the 12th-grade level, the average writing score was 5 points higher than in 2002 and 3 points higher than in 1998, and the percentage of students performing at or above the Basic level increased from 74% in 2002 to 82% in 2007. Gains carried across gender and were evident among most racial/ethnic groups.

In addition to the states that participated in the NAEP writing assessment, 10 urban school districts took part in the 2007 NAEP writing Trial Urban District Assessments (TUDA). Of the four districts that participated in both 2002 and 2007, three showed gains and one remained about even.

For details from The Nation's Report Card: Writing 2007, visit the NAEP website.

To celebrate the publication in October of One Million Men and Me by Kelly Starling Lyons, a book commemorating the 12th anniversary of the Million Man March, publisher Just Us Books is sponsoring "My Most Memorable Moment with My Father," a nationwide writing contest for elementary school youth across the United States. The contest is open to first- through fifth-grade students. For details, visit the following page on the Just Us Books website.

Every year, Roberta Valentine, an elementary school teacher in New York City, encounters a few students who cannot concentrate for more than a few moments. As a girl from her class once said, “Sometimes if I have to sit still for one more minute, I just can’t stand it.” A few years ago, Ms. Valentine read a book by Mel Levine, an expert on learning disabilities, about schoolchildren who have trouble focusing, and came across his term “mind trips” to describe such moments of distraction. She felt that it offered a clue about how to proceed. Read how she incorporated Levine’s ideas, writing assignments, and PowerPoint into her classroom to help her students focus in this article from The New York Times.

About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly. And if you’ve got a problem, don’t be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby). Read more of this article from MSNBC.com

OMG! TXT MSG turns 15! Cellphone-accessorized teens may think that’s just GR8. But as the lexicon spawned by a 160-character message limit starts to spill off the cellphone screen into written work, some of their English teachers aren’t exactly ROFL. Nor does seeing text abbreviations crop up in essays bring a smiley face to college admission officers. Read how text-messaging is like wearing flip-flops in this article from USA Today.

The Writing Improvement Network (WIN) will host its Fall Writing Conference November 7–9, 2007 at the Carolina First Center in Greenville, SC. The theme for this year’s conference is “Finding Your Voice.” Speakers will include Dr. Ruth Culham and Erin Gruwell, with Bruce Littlefield, Kate Salley Palmer, Ron Morris, and Craig Melvin participating in the Writers Block Panel. For more information, visit WIN’s conference website.

University of California Santa Barbara cultural studies professor Constance Penley says that when it comes to literacy among youth, there’s entirely too much hand-wringing going on. “They’re reading; they’re writing,” she said, “just not in the ways we think of it.” According to Penley, we need to see video images and text messages as an evolution rather than a devolution of literacy. Read more of this article from the Ventura County Star.

Heard the one about the cow inseminated by seamen? The plants sewn together or the rouge genetic elements? You will soon. Grammatically challenged undergraduates from Imperial College London, England, are about to be publicly shamed. Their tutor, Bernard Lamb, was so unimpressed by their poor spelling, punctuation, and choice of words that he started to keep a diary of every mistake. Lamb—unfortunately for his students, a member of the Queen’s English Society—was shocked, and occasionally amused, and he decided to take the experiment one step further and publish it. Read some of the bloopers at Guardian Unlimited.

Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson says he has always liked the comma, but finds that its use is shrinking. He writes that “the comma’s sad fate is, I think, a metaphor for something larger: how we deal with the frantic, can’t-wait-a-minute nature of modern life.” Read his column on how the comma’s fading popularity is also social commentary.

John Hancock wouldn’t recognize the handwriting taught in many schools today. And his loopy slanted script might as well be a foreign language to 21st century students. Time and technology have largely done away with traditional penmanship, leaving schools with a challenge that mirrors today’s fast pace: how to teach a cursive style that’s faster to write than older, ornate methods and easily readable. Read more of this article from the Vail Daily.

Launch Pad: Where Young Authors and Illustrators Take Off! is a new magazine devoted to publishing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, book reviews, and artwork by children ages 6–12. The magazine is currently accepting submissions for its debut issue, scheduled for January/February 2008. The publisher is looking for creative works about animals, the ocean, fairy tales and fantasy, heroes, mysteries, and sports. For more information and submission guidelines, visit the Launch Pad website.

The appearance of a particular substitute teacher has become a cause for celebration for one class, because she lets the students write whatever they want. And then she shreds it. This exercise, called writing practice, is designed to get students used to writing naturally—writing first and editing second. Read more in this article from the Christian Science Monitor.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is offering its second annual Art & Writing Institute this summer, July 27–28, at the museum in Ridgefield, CT. The institute is a professional development opportunity that enables teachers to expand their understanding of the relationship between art and writing. Teachers can learn to improve their students’ written and oral comprehension by using writing to respond to works of art. Susan Marcus is the keynote speaker, talking on new literacies, and Michael Bitz is presenting about the Comic Book Project. Registration is $225, with a discount for collaborating teachers from the same school. A light breakfast and lunch is included each day. For more information or to register, visit the museum’s website or contact Laura Kaufman at (203) 438-4519 or by e-mail. Registration is due by July 6.

Your child needs to check with a school friend about tomorrow’s book report. As she types that shorthand IM or text message, is she short-changing her writing skills? In their digitized futures, will our kids need the same longhand language skills that we did? Yes. From kindergarten to college, educators agree that by developing our kids’ writing skills, we are also helping them to discover, think and reason. Read more of this article, from Parents and Kids of Needham, MA, to learn 10 tips to get your child writing this summer.

The youth of Ireland are becoming increasingly poor spellers and writers, and their love of text messaging on cellphones is a major reason why, according to the Education Department. In a report published Wednesday on national test results in English for about 37,000 students aged 15 and 16, the department’s Examination Commission said cutting-edge communications technology has encouraged poor literacy and a blunt, choppy style at odds with academic rigor. Read more about the report in this article from USA Today.

For inmate-turned-author Evans D. Hopkins, reading and writing were fundamental to his salvation. “I wrote my way out of prison,” he told a group of incarcerated youths this week. “The pen is more powerful than the sword and the gun.” Hopkins has created a nonprofit group called The Reclamation Movement to reach youth led astray by a culture that glorifies criminal behavior. Read more about Hopkins in this article from the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Experts say technology—e-mail, text messaging, electronic banking—and standardized testing are making cursive writing unnecessary. Although cursive is taught in third-grade classrooms in Texas, educators say it’s taking a back seat to core disciplines such as math and reading. But many teachers and experts say students who don’t learn cursive are missing out on valuable lessons. Read more of this article from The Dallas Morning News.

The Mountain Man’s Field Guide to Grammar, which was released last year, is probably the only grammar book to include “grifter” and “pemmican” in its glossary and to teach the simple sentence with examples such as “Dirty Doris spit tobacco juice.” Read about the book’s author, Gary Spina, in this article from The New York Times.

Starting in 2011, the National Assessment of Educational Progress will test how well students in grades 8 and 12 can write on computers, rather than with the old schoolhouse standbys of pencils and paper. According to the 2011 NAEP Writing Framework, 100 million blogs—online journals—now exist worldwide, and 171 billion e-mail messages are sent daily. Future writing instruction, it says, must take into account how computers affect both the writing process and the types of text produced. Read more about these changes in this article from Education Week.

For many students today, writing extended essays is a task performed almost exclusively on a computer. It comes as no surprise, then, that a number of states have incorporated computer-based testing into their writing assessments. The movement to assess writing on computers also could grow if the directors of the influential National Assessment of Educational Progress act on a proposal to replace the handwritten test of writing at the 8th and 12th grade levels with a computerized exam. Find details in this Education Week article.

Fourth-graders at McKinley Elementary School in Beaverton, Oregon, started writing novels last November as part of National Novel Writing Month. Their school was among the 632 classes and 15,000 students across the U.S. participating in the National Novel Writing Month’s youth program. Now, a few months later, the students can proudly point to novels they have written, while their teachers proudly point out that writing test scores have improved. Read more from this article in The Oregonian.

For a group of Philadelphia inner-city middle school students, watching the movie Freedom Writers was like reliving the past year’s unusual odyssey, in which they wrote about their personal lives in journals and found the courage to read them to classmates. Their teacher was among the first in the country to try the approach with middle school students. As the students revealed thoughts that they had never shared, even with family, their attitudes toward school improved. Some belligerent students settled down, becoming mopre tolerant of one another. Career goals shifted. Some who at first barely wrote ended the year penning poetry and long entries. Read more about this successful program in this article from The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“[To] become good writers,” a “Writing Report Card” from the National Assessment of Educational Progress said in 1992, “students need expert instruction, frequent practice, and constructive feedback.” No doubt. But that report, like others before and since, left out the prime importance of reading. Can anyone learn to write at all without also knowing how to read? Read the views of Morris Freedman, professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, in this week’s edition of Education Week.

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November 15 marks the fifth anniversary of I Love to Write Day. Founded by Delaware author John Riddle, I Love to Write Day is a grassroots effort to have people of all ages practice their writing skills by writing a poem, an essay, a letter to the editor, or something else. In 2005, more than 20,000 schools participated. For further information, visit the I Love to Write website.

In a technical age, is there any reason to learn penmanship? There is if you’re a teacher in training at the University of Delaware, because neatness still counts. Look for this article in The News-Journal (Wilmington, DE).

A new class of education-specific weblogs is providing teachers and students new opportunities to share ideas with each other and with audiences that may be oceans or continents apart. Says one third grade teacher, “Never in 25 years of teaching have I seen a more powerful motivator for writing than blogs. . . . And that’s because of the audience. Writing is not just taped on the refrigerator and then put in the recycle bin. It’s out there for the world to see. Kids realize other people are reading what they write.” Learn more about the new blogs in The Seattle Times.

True or false: What a high school student says in an essay is less important than how he or she says it. Educator Will Fitzhugh contends that in American high schools too much emphasis is placed on style and subjective feelings in written work and too little on factual content. The tendency is reinforced by the new written portion of the SAT, whose graders are instructed to ignore the content of students’ essays in favor of a more “holistic” assessment. This kind of instruction, Fitzhugh contends, is not preparing students for the kinds of writing they’ll be expected to do in college. Find his essay in the latest edition of ASCD’s Educational Leadership.

Formal instruction in penmanship gets short shrift in the curriculum at most primary schools and has vanished altogether from many others. Not all teachers mourn its loss. Find this article in the Washington Post.

Primary-aged children should be taught how to write properly and adopt a nationally-prescribed handwriting style, a report has recommended. Researchers from London university’s institute of education said that all primaries should have a handwriting policy and a dedicated member of staff to teach it. Read more in the Times Educational Supplement (UK).

University students can’t write decent English. Worse, their attempts to do so show that many can’t follow a logical train of thought or present a reasoned argument. This damning verdict comes from professional writers who have been working with students in universities. They are shocked at what they have found, and have decided to make public a report summarising the full depths of their concerns. Learn more at The Independent (UK).

A prison teacher’s job is not an easy one, but one writer is encouraging men to open up through art and poetry. Find details in The Guardian (UK).

A university-based writing center called The Rotunda closes, and the loss of inspiration for aspiring writers is lamented.

Nancy Barile insists that her high-school students approach the craft of writing seriously, but she inspires them to meet the challenge and recently won a national award for her effective teaching.

British college undergraduates are incapable of composing even the most basic English sentences, according to a damning new report. Authors of the Royal Literacy Fund study found that students had the intellectual capacity to write well but had been let down by their schools’ neglect of good writing. Find this story in the Telegraph (UK).

Researchers who reviewed examination papers in England have determined that students who achieve the highest grades are far more likely than their predecessors to make spelling errors and to use slang in their formal essays. Find out more in The Independent (UK).

In the weeks since hurricanes ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast, sitting down with pen and paper or fingers on keyboard has helped many young people digest what’s happened. For some, it’s been a way to vent or express sympathy and support for disaster victims. For others, it’s a way to come to terms with their own experiences of catastrophe. This Associated Press story appears in the Las Vegas Sun.

After marking GCSE exam papers for the past two weeks, this anonymous grader says standards are not only dropping, but they are unbelievably low. Get a test examiner’s view of “the dreadfully low standard of students’ written skills” in The Guardian (UK).

Writing is considered an even more important job requirement for nearly 2.7 million state employees across the U.S. than it is for employees in the private-sector, yet a significant number of these workers fall short of states’ expectations. As a result, taxpayers spend nearly a quarter of a billion dollars annually to provide supplementary writing training for state employees. These are among the findings of a new report published by the The National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges.