If reading gets most of the glory in literacy conversations, writing is often the tired younger sibling quietly doing a huge amount of work in the background. But writing matters a lot. It matters for school, for communication, for knowledge building, and frankly, for life beyond the classroom. Writing helps students demonstrate understanding, share ideas, participate in academic communities, and communicate in personal, civic, and digital spaces (Graham, 2019; Nobel, 2021). Across subjects, teachers already use writing to support learning, which tells us something important: writing is not an “extra.” It is part of how students think, learn, and show what they know (Gillespie et al., 2014; Nobel, 2021).

That is exactly why good writing instruction matters so much. Strong writing does not simply appear because students are given a prompt and a quiet room. Writing is complex. It draws on planning, organizing, sentence construction, transcription, revising, motivation, and working memory all at once (Hayes & Flower, 1980; Hayes, 1996; Nobel, 2021). When students struggle with spelling, handwriting, typing, grammar, or vocabulary, those demands can eat up the cognitive space they need for generating and organizing ideas (Nobel, 2021). In other words, many struggling writers are not lazy or careless. They are overloaded.

That is one reason explicit instruction matters. Students do not just magically know how to write a narrative, an explanation, or an argument. As I kept coming back to in my course notes when thinking about how best to teach my kiddos, for many of them have basically been asked to build the plane while flying it when they don’t even know how to fold a paper airplane. Teaching text structures, genre expectations, sentence construction, and planning strategies makes writing more visible and more teachable (Philippakos & Graham, 2023, as cited in Study Aid 6; Sedita, 2022). Sedita’s Writing Rope is especially helpful here because it reminds us that writing is a braided process made up of critical thinking, syntax, text structure, writing craft, and transcription. If one strand is weak, the whole thing gets shakier (Sedita, 2022).

So Good Instruction?

Good writing instruction matters because reading and writing should not be separated as if they live in different neighbourhoods. Graham (2020) argues that they are mutually supportive literacy processes. Writing about reading, taking notes, answering questions in writing, and analyzing how texts are structured can all improve reading. Reading, in turn, supports writing through vocabulary, syntax, background knowledge, and text models (Graham, 2020). That overlap between them is one of the most useful notions I acquired from my Cont 937 course at Queen’s University because it makes writing instruction feel less like one more thing to squeeze in and more like a powerful way to build literacy across the board.

Motivation matters too. Students are more likely to write when the task feels meaningful, social, and manageable, not just like another thing to hand in for marks. They want something with authentic purpose, opportunities for choice, collaboration, teacher modelling, and step-by-step supports can all make writing feel more possible, but most importantly, we want our students to recognise that their work in school is transferable to the quote on quote “real world”(Boscolo & Gelati, 2019). That matters especially in the middle years, where students who may already see themselves as “bad writers” start to shut down before they even begin – constantly, my grade 9’s ponder dropping out as they can’t understand why school matters, especially English class.

Where do we go from here?

The encouraging part is that we do know quite a bit about what helps. Research summarized in Writing Instruction Matters points to explicit teaching of the writing process, explicit teaching of text structures, guided feedback, strategy instruction, self-regulation, prewriting supports, and scaffolds such as graphic organizers as effective approaches for struggling writers (Gersten & Baker, 2001; Gillespie & Graham, 2014; Nobel, 2021). The SRSD framework is especially promising because it combines strategy instruction with self-regulation, helping our students plan, draft, and revise more independently over time (Harris & Graham, 1992; Nobel, 2021). That kind of instruction does not make writing easy, but it does make it more possible.

For me, that is the heart of it. Good writing instruction matters because writing is too important to leave to chance. If we want students to become stronger thinkers, clearer communicators, and more confident learners, then writing deserves explicit, thoughtful, evidence-informed teaching.

That includes more than telling them to “just write a paragraph.”

References

Boscolo, P., & Gelati, C. (2019). Motivating writers. In S. Graham, C. A. MacArthur, & M. Hebert (Eds.), Best practices in writing instruction (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Gersten, R., & Baker, S. (2001). Teaching expressive writing to students with learning disabilities: A meta-analysis. The Elementary School Journal, 101(3), 251–272.

Gillespie, A., & Graham, S. (2014). A meta-analysis of writing interventions for students with learning disabilities. Exceptional Children, 80(4), 454–473.

Gillespie, A., Graham, S., Kiuhara, S., & Hebert, M. (2014). High school teachers’ use of writing to support students’ learning: A national survey. Reading and Writing, 27(6), 1043–1072.

Graham, S. (2019). Changing how writing is taught. Review of Research in Education, 43(1), 277–303.

Graham, S. (2020). The sciences of reading and writing must become more fully integrated. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S35–S44.

Harris, K. R., & Graham, S. (1992). Self-regulated strategy development: A framework for teaching students writing strategies and self-regulation.

Hayes, J. R. (1996). A new framework for understanding cognition and affect in writing.

Hayes, J. R., & Flower, L. S. (1980). Identifying the organization of writing processes.

Lammert, C., & Riordan, E. (2019). She’s not going to tell you what to ask: Three strategies for writing in science. The Reading Teacher, 73(3), 367–373. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1824

Nobel, K. (2021). Writing instruction matters: Research on writing instruction and technology-based writing instruction for students with writing difficulties (Doctoral dissertation, University of Cologne). 

Sedita, J. (2022). The Writing Rope: A framework for explicit writing instruction in all subjects.