Test I Reading and Language Arts Study Guide for the GACE

The Writing Process

The writing process is just that—a recursive process that students should apply to their writing from a young age so that it becomes a habit that lasts a lifetime. The writing process is the practice of prewriting, writing, revising, editing, and publishing a text. Good writers (including professionals!) engage in all steps of the writing process, repeating some of the steps multiple times until texts are polished and ready to share with an audience. Understanding that writing is a process and that “once and done” writing does not provide the best results possible will set your students up to be much more successful writers throughout their educational careers and in life in general. Taking the time to plan, draft, revise, and edit, sometimes multiple times, and apply the writing process to their own work will yield better writing results for students.

Steps in the Process

The writing process is often visually represented as a circle with arrows or in a flow chart with arrows to indicate which steps students might come back to several times before (and sometimes even after) publication. Following these steps and spending time on each one will help students build their writing skills. It is important to remember that while many graphic organizers and planning pages exist out there for each step of the writing process, different approaches may work better for different students.

Offer young writers several choices for planning, drafting, revising, and editing, and consider allowing them to also create their own approach. While graphic organizers can provide strong support and scaffolding for students, they can also stifle some thinkers and writers, so remember to keep students’ individual needs in mind when assigning writing tasks and providing support for those tasks.

Prewriting

Writers of all ages tend to balk and panic when staring at a blank page or empty screen. Engaging in prewriting activities can help alleviate some of that fear and uncertainty about how to start because the writer is thinking about the topic and, without worrying about structure or coherence, recording some thoughts and ideas from which to start writing. There are a wide variety of prewriting strategies and procedures students might use to begin thinking about their writing task. It is important to provide choices for how to consider the topic and how to plan to write.

Brainstorming—One of the most popular starting activities when one faces a writing task is to brainstorm a response to the question or to “quickwrite” everything we know about a particular topic. This usually means writing down key words or ideas or phrases related to the writing topic. Brainstorming can be messy, as it is a free stream-of-consciousness type of planning. It should be basic ideas and key words, not complete sentences or fully developed paragraphs. Brainstorming allows writers to get something on the page and is a preliminary step in gathering information and material on which to write. There is no judgment during brainstorming—if you think of something, you write it down. Not everything that gets written in a brainstorm may be included in the final draft, but the time for editing the brainstormed content is later. More is likely to be added, but this activity is a starting point that arms the writer with some thoughts and ideas from which to build.

Planning—Once students have brainstormed and considered the topic about which they are to write, then they take a look at the info they have gathered and begin to organize it. This is the planning stage where the ideas expressed in the brainstorm go through a level of scrutiny to determine what to keep, what can go, and in what order the ideas make sense. This organization and clean up may take the form of a list, a chart, an outline, or any number of other organizational structures. The idea is that writers are considering what ideas they plan to develop in their writing and determine what additional information needs to be gathered to successfully communicate their message to the audience. In young writers, this planning phase might be figuring out what order to put the steps in if they are writing a “how-to” paper , what the cause and effect relationship is between their ideas, or what order to put their examples in about why they didn’t like a particular movie, for example.

Writing

In the writing stage of the writing process, students use their prewriting work (notes, brainstorms, outlines, planning pages, etc.) and begin to develop their ideas into complete sentences and paragraphs. The writing step is where they include details to support their main idea and organize their writing into coherent sentences and paragraphs. This step in the process may be returned to later so that students can add more to their writing, filling in gaps or missing information that may be discovered during the revising step.

Revising

Revising is the first step toward polishing a final draft for submission. Students tend to want to end the writing process after the writing portion, calling their work “done!” well before it actually is. Encouraging them to participate in all of the steps of the writing process will help them gain an understanding of, and appreciation for, each of the steps. Revising gives students an opportunity to look at the “big picture” of their writing. Does their response make sense? Did they leave out any details? Did they include any information that is unnecessary? Is it organized in a logical way that makes sense to the reader? These kinds of questions help students look critically at their work and identify areas for improvement. They then return to the writing step to address those questions and concerns, adding in more information or details or examples and/or getting rid of unnecessary information, and considering the organization and structure. Students may move back and forth between the writing and revising stages several times before they are ready to move on to editing. Speaking of editing, remember that, although the terms are often used interchangeably, the revising and editing stages are not the same thing. Revision focuses on the big picture: the overall structure, looking for places to improve the clarity or word choice, opportunities to add in more or better support or examples, etc. Editing requires a whole different focus.

Editing

In the editing stage of the writing process, students focus on the details. Editing considers a text with a sentence-by-sentence approach, looking for issues in grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. By now, because the revising stage has been completed, the content is solid, but the writer needs to focus his or her attention on the grammatical mistakes. Editing is much more detail-oriented than the revision stage. It is possible that during editing students may want to go back and revise part of their text—that’s great! Encourage them to revisit any part of the process at any point they feel they need to in order to produce their best work. Early writers may benefit from some sort of editing checklist to apply to their work, looking for specific grammatical elements that may have been covered recently that the teacher expects to see reflected in their writing. A checklist or rubric will help students know what to look for and what to consider in their writing.

Publishing

Publishing isn’t just for full-length books. Publishing student work means sharing it with an audience. The audience may be the teacher, classmates, parents, community, etc.—it is getting the writing “out there” to be seen by others. There are a variety of ways student work may be published. In addition to submitting it to the teacher, who may then post it on the wall or read it aloud to the class, for example, collecting copies of paper drafts and compiling them into a book for each student in the class or publishing work digitally and posting to a virtual classroom “wall” can be ways student work may be shared with a wider audience.

Types of Text

The various text structures are also important in the writing process. They help the writer plan a writing piece and stay on topic. You can find information about each of them back in the reading section of this study guide.

Resource Materials and Digital Tools

As students develop as readers and writers, they begin to expand their knowledge base and conduct their own research to find more information about a particular subject or idea. Using resource materials, including online sources, to gather information requires careful scrutiny and evaluation of potential sources and if material from outside resources are used, citing those sources to give credit to the original author. As 21st century learners, students are also learning how to navigate and utilize digital tools to access and engage with texts. However, the use of digital tools and resource materials comes with several warnings and things to consider.

The Rules for Using Sources

When using resource materials, whether in print form or from online, digital sources, certain rules must be followed. The most important rule is to always cite your source. This helps the writer avoid plagiarism, which is a serious ethical (and in some cases legal) violation. Plagiarism is using the words or ideas of another without giving credit to that source. Generally accepted “common knowledge” type information does not need to be cited, but when students conduct research and are required to include resource material in their writing, they need to give credit to the author or authors whose ideas they are referring to and using in their writing. As students take notes on sources they may incorporate in their own writing, they need to be able to distinguish between actual quotes, summaries, and paraphrases they may make of a source and cite them correctly in their writing. This note-taking may involve the use of notecards or some other organizational structure or just writing down main ideas. Regardless of the format, citation is required.

It is also important, when using outside sources, to evaluate the source. Not all information is equal. Discerning readers weigh the credibility of the source to determine if the information presented is likely to be accurate or trustworthy. Consider: does the person writing or presenting this information have the authority to do so? Do they know what they are talking about? How can I be sure?

Credible Sources—When guiding students in using sources in their research and writing, show them how to evaluate a source to test its credibility. Just about anyone can put just about anything up on the internet and claim to know what they are talking about. The information in those sources may not be true or accurate, so it’s important to show students how to evaluate the credibility of potential sources and make sure they can trust the information being shared by the author. Evaluating the source’s use of evidence, considering the author’s authority on the subject, and looking for bias are critical steps in discerning whether a source may be credible and trustworthy or not. Students should always use credible sources in their writing to support their own ideas and thoughts.

Primary Sources—The best and most accurate information generally comes straight from the source. That’s what a primary source is, a source of information from someone who was actually there and who has a firsthand account of an incident. Primary sources include things like diaries or letters, interviews, documents, or news reports, but may also include photographs, images, or artwork. Primary sources provide firsthand evidence not filtered through anyone else’s lens or interpretation.

Secondary Sources—Secondary sources are evaluations or interpretations of primary sources. Rather than providing direct evidence from eyewitnesses, secondary sources provide commentary, insight, or reflection about evidence the writer does not have firsthand knowledge of or direct experience with. Secondary sources may still provide valuable insight to an event, but they must be taken with a grain of salt and understood to be an interpretation, not a recitation of actual events. Examples of secondary sources would be things like biographies, essays, textbooks, and scholarly articles.

Digital Literacy

In an increasingly digital and online world, digital literacy is a critical skill for students to learn. It is not enough to let students loose on the internet and tell them to “go research” without first teaching them about how to find, evaluate, and effectively use what they find. There is no shortage of digital information available to students of all ages, but just because it’s on the internet doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true or accurate information. Teaching students to be discerning users of digital media is important to laying a foundation for them to be critical and independent thinkers, readers, and writers.

In addition to accessing material digitally, students are increasingly being asked to create work in a digital space. From computer-adaptive testing to electronic portfolios of work, students must know how to create, save, and share their work in a variety of digital spaces using multiple digital learning tools and systems. Teachers are also called upon to incorporate digital tools as learning tools with their students, so both teachers and students need a certain level of digital literacy to be able to successfully navigate through today’s learning environments.

Security and Safety

Internet safety is an area of concern for parents and teachers alike. While the internet can be an amazing source of information, navigating through its potential dangers can be a daunting task. School districts will often set up filters and firewalls to help control where students can navigate to, but if students don’t have that same level of protection when using a public computer at the library, for example, they may run into trouble. Set internet usage rules for your students and teach them about internet safety and security. Children often don’t understand just how wide-reaching the world-wide web is and are trusting of adults who may reach out to them. In today’s world, an online presence opens up the possibility for online bullying and cyber harassment. Teach students healthy internet and digital space habits and set rules and boundaries to help keep them safe in their online explorations.