Writing Dinosaurs
By Maryann Manning

Redpenodon rightfully gets a bad rap for being a budding writer's worst critic.

There are some writing dinosaurs whose extinction I want to hasten by writing about them. I've found that the best way to banish such unwanted beasts is by sharing knowledge about the writing process. All of the dinosaurs in question belong to the "Before Writing Workshop" era. Donald Graves and others at the University of New Hampshire mounted the blitz on the demise of Producttonia, Storystarteratops, Formulasaurus and Redpenodon. The works of Lucy Calkins, Nancie Atwell, Ralph Fletcher, Carol Avery and so many more continue to aid Graves in his noble barrage. Many of these aforementioned dinosaurs are becoming extinct because the writing workshop thrives in most classrooms today.

Producttonia
It's painful for me to admit that I actually gave writing assignments, told my students to write for 45 minutes and then collected the papers. I took the pieces of writing home and graded them with letter grades because I wasn't blessed with knowledge about the writing process. I was completely focused on the product and my classroom wasn't one where students were supported as they engaged in the writing process and improved their written pieces.

We now know that if we focus on the writing process, the written products will become better and better. Before the writing workshop era, we didn't know that our students could do exactly what good writers have always done when they write: rehearse, draft, revise content, engage in conferences with others, edit for mechanics and finally, publish pieces. We don't have to sacrifice anything because process and product are not mutually exclusive.

Producttonia has thankfully also fled from writing assignments in other areas of the curriculum. In science and social studies, many teachers use process writing as students go from drafting to revising and finally to publication of reports and other written assignments. As more and more teachers learn about the writing process, Producttonia is vanishing from the curriculum.

Storystarteratops
This dinosaur has an alias, known as "Promptatops" in some educational circles. So many of us have been guilty of using story starters because we didn't know that every writer has hundreds of topics that just need to be coaxed to the surface. When I began teaching, the power and necessity of prior knowledge in reading and writing wasn't emphasized. We now know that good writing requires prior knowledge and when we assign writing topics or prompts that students know nothing about, the quality of the writing will suffer.

When I assigned some of my story starters like, "How it feels to be the last snowflake to melt," I didn't understand why my students weren't at all interested in the piece. Now I know that in order for a student to grapple with writing a good piece, their interest in the topic is absolutely a necessity.

There's a time of the year when Storystarteratops or Promptatops can come out of hiding, but only for a short time. When the class is preparing for writing assessments, it's often necessary to give students the experience of writing to a prompt. Because we do not want to handicap our students when they take mandated writing assessments, spending a few weeks preparing may be justified. I believe we should tell our students that the prompts are temporary and only for test preparation. I think the students should know that because the topic might be foreign, they probably won't do their best writing.

Formulasaurus
This dinosaur still lives in some places and should be driven off the planet. I have met students as young as third grade and some in secondary school who actually believe the length of all written pieces should be five paragraphs. I wish I were exaggerating, but I'm not. You may be asking yourself, "How could that happen?" My opinion is that the writing assessments in their states gave the highest rating on the rubric for five-paragraph essays, so they spent the entire year practicing.

Not all five-paragraph essays are formulaic, but our students should never think that good writing is any set length. Good writing has no set number of paragraphs or number of words because each author writes about a topic in a unique manner.

Just as I think that Storystarteratops can reappear when preparing for testing, I agree that Formulasaurus can be alive before the annual writing assessment. It should be clear, however, that its existence is temporary and not a part of the good teaching of writing.

Redpenodon
The use of a red pen to correct writing has been bad-mouthed for a long time now, and most of us have stopped using it because we were made to feel guilty about chopping up student writing with surface editing. When I was a student, I expected "awk" (short for "awkward") to be written on each page in red ink when papers were returned. I associated a red pen with criticism and I was happy or sad depending upon the amount of red ink on the pages.

When I began teaching I didn't use a red pen; but even though I had changed the color of the ink, there was still a problem. I hadn't thought about what was really the message behind the use of the red pen. I was still just correcting mechanics and acting as a copy editor. I wasn't writing meaningful or substantive comments that would help support the development of my students into good writers.

Years later when I was observing excellent schools in New Zealand, I saw a really good use of the red pen. In the middle of each table that was surrounded by the children's chairs were a bunch of red pens in a holder. I watched as the children first edited their own writing and then each other's writing by using a red pen. I saw teachers comment to the children about how they had revised their work as evidenced by the use of the red pen. I really wish that I would have thought of that because it's a wonderful use of red pens.

Be sure to look around your classroom for other writing dinosaurs. Lurking behind the blackboard, buried in that bottom drawer – we all still have some of them. As we improve our teaching and move to higher levels of professionalism, hopefully we will finally be able to eradicate all of them.

Maryann Manning is on the faculty of the School of Education, the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

November/December, 2006, Vol.37, No.3