8 Strategies for Teaching Writing That Get Results

Let’s be honest: the writing process is MESSY. Good writing requires patience, time and effort, trial and error, ugly first drafts, and multiple revisions. Grammar. Ideas. Structure. Style. Voice.

None of these things, however, interest our students. Patience? Multiple rewrites? Staring at a blank page until creativity strikes? Finding active verbs to make writing more vivid? Considering the reader? No, thanks.

We’ve struggled to find strategies for teaching writing that work consistently for our students, especially since writing is hard to teach through a one-size-fits-all approach. It works best in one-on-one instruction, working with the same student through the entire process and providing ample feedback.

But this is wildly implausible, especially in public schools where class sizes often number 35 or higher. Our students’ reading and writing skills are further behind than ever, thanks to the rise of short-form media content and a global pandemic that kept students out of classrooms for 18 months.

We’ll never make the claim that we’ve mastered strategies for teaching writing. Most years, we work hard, try new things, and say goodbye to students who still aren’t great writers. It is frustrating and disheartening, and it can make us feel ineffective, especially since writing is a skill our students need.

But, over time, we have learned to focus on smaller skills that pay dividends. As we nudge our students along the long and winding path toward becoming better writers, these eight strategies for teaching writing help us all feel like we are, at least, getting somewhere.

8 Strategies for Teaching Writing

Prioritize Repetition and Consistency

When we first started teaching, we strove for breadth, assigning all the genres listed in the content standards: narrative, informative, and persuasive essays along with business letters and research papers. But each writing unit felt disconnected from the others—we were all over the place, trying to engage students and tailoring our lessons toward the unique characteristics of each genre.

The more we found strategies that worked with multiple genres, however, the more effective our writing lessons became. Instead of worrying about students getting bored, we offered repeated opportunities to practice the same basic skills. And as students mastered and internalized these bite-sized skills, their overall writing quality inched just a bit further along.

Write Paragraphs Frequently

It seems like the traditional way to teach writing is through 2–3 week-long writing units, but there are only so many of those you can fit into a school year (and only so many essays you can provide feedback on).

When we started focusing on the paragraph instead of the essay (not to the essay’s exclusion, of course), our students were more willing to participate (which meant they got more practice), and we were more able to provide them with regular feedback and opportunities for revision.

Instead of giving credit/no credit for lengthy study guides, we started assigning guided reading made up of multiple-choice questions with only one short-answer question that required a highly structured response. For these single questions, we provided feedback and the opportunity to revise, something that was never practical with longer essays. Over time, the repeated practice led to stronger responses from students of all levels.

Emphasize Thesis Statements

Of course, most of us review thesis statements, the backbone of any solid essay. But, for the students we serve, one lesson isn’t enough to truly master this skill before we move on to something else. 

Students who can write a strong thesis statement tend to set themselves up for a stronger essay overall. These students have a clear claim, an organizational strategy, and a focus to guide the writing process. And if you teach AP students, the College Board’s rubrics allocate an entire point for including this statement.

Writing thesis statements is also one of the few writing skills for which we can give our students clear, reusable guidelines. Organizational strategies might change with genre, but thesis statements must always make an arguable claim that clearly and concisely answers the question in the prompt.

Students can practice just writing thesis statements, they can practice using thesis statements to construct an outline, and they can practice writing topic sentences for shorter responses that follow the same guidelines. This repeated practice of one small skill is something all our students can do, and as these individual sentences got better, so did the writing that supported them.

Organize Essays Chronologically

One of our best strategies for teaching writing was the fruit of frustration (isn’t that where all our best ideas originate?). In essay after essay, our AP English Literature students focused on one scene to the exclusion of the novel as a whole or jumped back and forth between parts of a story with abandon, giving us figurative whiplash.

When we started requiring students to organize any essay about a text (fiction, nonfiction, prose excerpt, poem, novel, play) chronologically (at the very least, one paragraph about the beginning, one paragraph about the middle, one paragraph about the end), their writing improved far faster than when we tried to offer multiple organizational strategies they could select from depending on their individual arguments.
Nonfiction authors build lines of reasoning into their writing, and most themes in fiction are evident in a character’s progression through a challenging situation. When our students follow that same order in building their own arguments, they learn to develop a persuasive line of reasoning in a simple, concrete way.

Require Students to Punctuate, Cite, and Integrate Quotations Correctly

Nothing makes writing look better faster than correctly punctuating, citing, and integrating quotations. One of our best teaching decisions was devoting ourselves wholeheartedly (or, perhaps, bullheadedly) to the task of getting students to master this skill. 

We created a “Student Scholar’s Guide to Quotations” explaining seven rules for punctuating quotations and modeling four methods for integrating quotations, gave it to students at the beginning of the year, and demanded they use it regularly. We began sending responses back for revision EVERY. TIME. students made a mistake in punctuation or integration (or, heaven forbid, dropped in a standalone quote), pointing them directly toward the rule they had violated, which allowed us to quickly provide targeted feedback.

Students hated this, and for the first few months, it felt like a battle of wills. But as students continued to get responses sent back, they started actually referring to the guide. They started asking questions. And, yes, they started punctuating their quotations correctly.

Even better? As we required students to alternate between four different methods for integrating quotations, by indicating within the question or writing task the method to be used, their writing improved dramatically. Not only were their integrations more varied and interesting, but their writing became more vivid and sophisticated. When students really dove in and tried to improve, we were impressed by the quality of writing they produced.

Teach Students How to Select Effective Quotations

Naturally, spending so much time staring at students’ quotations caused us to become increasingly aware of how lame their quotations were. So many students selected quotations that didn’t work, barely worked, or essentially restated their claim. 

We started requiring that students find quotations that showed their claim to be true rather than telling us their claim was true. This meant, again, that their responses got sent back for revision. 
As students began selecting quotations that focused on showing rather than telling, the quality of their commentary increased significantly. With “showing” quotations, their commentary actually had a purpose: they had to explain how the quotation supported their argument. They were no longer writing repetitive paragraphs that just made the same claim over and over and were instead beginning to create arguments.

Give Your Students Sentence Frames

We all seem to agree sentence frames have value for beginning writers and English learners. But too often, we are rushed to get students off the frames as quickly as possible lest we be guilty of too much “hand-holding.”

We are big believers in sentence frames and in using them for as long as is necessary, even if that means we used them for the entire year with process-written essays. For one thing, they model academic language, and with repeated use, students begin to internalize the sentence starters and structures and use them in their own writing. 

More importantly, however, sentence frames help our students to focus on the quality of their ideas. Because they’re not stuck on “what to write next,” they can concentrate on what they are actually saying, ideally developing more sophisticated arguments. When we limit the number of writing elements our students have to consider at the same time, writing becomes much more manageable—something they, too, can do.

Do we need to remove those frames at some point? Of course. But maybe we also need to view writing instruction as a multi-year process, not one that starts over at the beginning of each school year and must be completed by the year’s end.

Embrace Your Favorite Paragraph Structure

When we started requiring students to use the TEPAC paragraph format after a district-sponsored training, we saw rapid improvement in the quality of their writing. Over the years, we refined that format into something that worked better for our students, what we call the 5 Cs: Claim, Concrete Evidence Sentence, Context Sentence, Commentary Sentence, Connecting Sentence.

Asking students to use that structure helped them know “what to write next” and gave them an idea of how, specifically, to effectively include claims, evidence, and commentary in their writing. And our students practiced this over, and over, and over again. On short-answer responses, students who left out a sentence or didn’t follow the guidelines for that sentence had to keep revising until they did it right, and the format became more natural to them as the year continued.

A Note

You’ll notice we often advise sending student responses back for revision when they don’t meet expectations. If you’re like we used to be, you’re probably thinking, “Ain’t no one got time for that!” We hear you. We were you. Part of the reason we embraced focusing on the paragraph more often than the essay, using multiple-choice questions and one structured short answer response, four methods of integrating or embedding quotes rather than all the possible ways, was so that it would be reasonable (both for ourselves and our students) to include revision opportunities within our assignments. 

Even as adults who want to be better writers, we find comments about things we don’t have an opportunity to change not particularly meaningful. Sure, we’ll try to remember for “next time,” but a lot of noise is going to occupy the space in between, and it’s likely we’ll forget. Revising something today to submit tomorrow? Those comments we can put to use.

Conclusions

Are these groundbreaking ideas that will solve all your students’ writing problems? Of course not. Teaching writing is as much of a messy, keep-trying, learn-as-you-go process as writing itself. But we don’t have to wait an agonizingly long time to see results, and we don’t have to cover the full writing process in every lesson. Selecting a few key strategies for teaching writing to focus on allows us to see big gains in students’ writing that build their confidence and add up to significant improvement over time.

Don’t start from scratch implementing these strategies in your classroom: we’ve got you covered. Join our free resource library, download our free MLA guide that includes the six rules for punctuating quotations, and start drilling in on that skill (and seeing gains in your students’ writing) right away. Like what you see? We’ve got a full unit plan that includes the four methods for integrating quotations and practice activities.