One Sentence ata Time - The Need for Explicit Instruction in Teaching Students to Write Well

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Stanley

Article excerpt arguing that students struggle with writing because schools often do not teach it through explicit, carefully sequenced instruction starting at the sentence level. It describes cases like Monica, who could learn content and math but produced incoherent, minimal essays. It highlights low writing proficiency rates on national tests and notes that early encouragement to write at length, later assumptions of writing readiness, and insufficient guidance under standards leave teachers without a clear road map. The authors present The Writing Revolution as that roadmap.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryExam

FormatPDF

Pages9

Reading Time23 min

AccessFree to download

The Need for Explicit Instruction in Teaching Students to Write Well

One Sentence ata Time The Need for Explicit Instruction in Teaching Students to Write Well By Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler W hen Monica entered high school, her writing skills were minimal. After repeating first grade and getting more than 100 hours of tutoring in elementary school, she’d managed to learn to Monica’s history teacher asked her to write an essay on Alexander the Great.“I think Alexander the Great was one of the best military leaders,” Monica wrote. Her entire response consisted of six simple sentences, one of which didn’t make sense. An actual essay, Monica said later,“wasn’t going to happen. It was like, well, I got a sentence down. What now?” ILLUSTRAT IONS BY SERGE BLOCH read well enough to get by, and she was comfortable with math. But writing seemed beyond her reach. During her freshman year at New Dorp HighSchool, a historically low-performing school on Staten Island in New York City, Judith C. Hochman is a former superintendent and a former head of the Windward School in White Plains, New York. She is the founder of The Writing Revolution, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching students how to think and write clearly. Natalie Wexler is an education journalist and blogger in Washington, D.C. This article is excerpted with permission from their book, The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking through Writing in All Subjects and Grades. Copyright 2017 Jossey-Bass/Wiley. Monica’s mother, who had spent many frustrating years trying to help her daughter improve her academic performance, was equally skeptical about Monica’s ability to write an essay.“It just didn’t seem like something Monica could ever do.”1 Unfortunately, Monica is far from alone. Across the country—and especially in schools serving students from low-income families and English language learners—students at all grade levels have similar problems expressing themselves clearly and coherently in writing. On nationwide tests, only about 25 percent of students are able to score at a proficient level in writing.2 And yet, expository writing—the kind of writing that explains and informs—is essential for success in school and the work- 30 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SUMMER 2017 place. Students who can’t write at a competent level struggle in college. With the advent ofe-mail and the Internet, an increasing number of jobs require solid writing skills. That’s true even of many jobs—such as being a paramedic—that people may not think of as involving writing. No matter what path students choose in life, the ability to communicate their thoughts in writing in a way that others can easily understand is crucial. The problem is not that students like Monica are incapable of learning to write well. Rather, the problem is that American schools haven’t been teaching students how to write. Teachers may have assigned writing, but they haven’t explicitly taught it in a careful sequence of logical steps, beginning at the sentence level. That’s not the fault of the teachers: in the vast majority of cases, their training didn’t include instruction in how to teach writing. The assumption has been that if students read enough, they’ll simply pickup writing skills through a kind of osmosis. But writing is the hardest thing we ask students to do, and the evidence is clear that very few students become good writers on their own. Many students—even atthe college level—have difficulty constructing a coherent sentence, let alone a fluid, cohesive essay. If you’rereading this article, which is drawn from our book, The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking through Writing in All Subjects and Grades, chances are that at least some of your students, and perhaps most, fall into that category. To be effective, writing instruction should start in elementary school. But when students do get a chance to write in elementary school, they’re often encouraged to write at length too soon, sometimes at a furious pace. They

FAQs

Why do students struggle to write well, according to the article?

Students are not taught writing through explicit, logical steps beginning at the sentence level. Many schools assume students will pick up writing skills indirectly through reading, which the article says rarely works.

What example illustrates the writing problem described?

Monica enters high school with minimal writing skills despite tutoring and being able to do math. Her essay response is brief and includes sentences that don’t make sense.

How does the article say writing instruction should be handled across grade levels?

It should start in elementary school with building grammatically correct, interesting sentences first, then planning and outlining. Later, teachers should not rely on the assumption that students already know the basics.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Stanley