How Do You Feel About Writing?

When you think about having to write for school, which gif best represents how you feel? Why do you feel this way?

Many students struggle with writing in school, but research shows that this generation of students is writing more than any other previous generation. According to the article below, this generation is socializing in an online format called "life writing" - where students are thinking of their audience and changing their tone and language to make sure they are understood. 

Getting Started

One of the first steps in the writing process is to consider TPA (topic, purpose, audience). Think back to the media unit; in one of the lessons, you considered how to incorporate TPA into your media texts. The skill of considering TPA is the same in writing. Think about it this way:

Consider the writing you are likely most familiar with.

In today's modern society, we have more forms of writing than ever before. As you saw in the Minds On activity, more people are engaging in "life writing" that is commonly shared through social media. As with reading, we often do not realize how much we are actually writing throughout our day, as many people do not consider social media posts, texting or comments on posts as writing. Take a look at this infographic to see the statistics on what happens in an "Internet Minute." 18 million texts and 481,000 tweets are sent per minute across the world. All of those messages will have a topic and purpose that the author constructs in order to communicate meaning to their audience. Click on the graphic to see a larger version.

Read through these tweets to see if you can identify the topic, purpose and audience. Also consider what evidence makes you think this way.

Now, take a few minutes to consider your "life writing." Do you think about TPA when you write your posts, or is it something you do naturally? Most likely the answer is naturally, but for this lesson you will be consciously considering what you are writing about, why you are writing it and who you are writing it for. Before you write for this course, make sure you consider TPA in order to be able to effectively plan your text.

The next step is to plan out what type of writing you will be creating. There are many different forms of written texts, (definition:Written texts include essays, reports, novels, blogs, tweets, articles, diaries, et cetera.) but there are four main types(definition:Types means styles of writing.) that they tend to fit into:

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Each style of writing has its own general purpose, but the topics and audiences are decided upon by the writer based on the meaning they are trying to communicate. In this course, you will be writing pieces in all four types.  Even though you have the general purpose, you are encouraged to make it more specific and, depending on the task, you may have to decide on the topic and audience.

Once you know the TPA and style of writing you will be doing, the next step is to come up with your ideas and organize them in a method that makes sense to you. You may have heard this step referred to as the "brainstorming" phase of the writing process.

The purpose of brainstorming is to come up with a variety of ideas about your topic. It is often easiest to write about a topic that you know about, but this is not always possible depending on the purpose for your writing. There are many ways to brainstorm and there is no right or wrong method; you need to figure out what works for you.

Here are some brainstorming techniques.

Mind Maps: These are diagrams that display ideas visually (can be done using a tool like Mindomo, GoConqr, MindMeister or paper). Click on the graphics to see larger versions.

Here's a mind map explaining how to make a mind map:

Sticky Notes:

KWHLAQ Method:

Discussions: One of the biggest misconceptions about writing is that it needs to be done in isolation, when it makes a lot of sense to include others in your process. Have some conversations with a friend or adult to help you come up with some other ideas at various points during the writing process.

Once you have a number of ideas, it is time to organize them into some kind of order that makes sense.

• Do you have ideas that go together?
  • If so, put them together and remove any that you feel do not work.
• Do you have a chronological (definition: Items are arranged in the order that they happened.) order?
• Do you see a main idea emerging from your brainstorming?
  • If so, what are your supporting details?
• Do you have an idea that is catching your attention?
  • Do you have enough other details to support your thinking?
    • (If not, time to do some more brainstorming.)  

When you have your ideas organized in a way that makes sense to you, come up with one main idea and use your other ideas to support your thinking.

At this point you should have a main idea and a number of supporting details that work together to express your intended meaning to your audience. Once you are at this point, it is helpful to use a graphic organizer for your writing. This organizer, Basic Writing Outline, can be used to help plan out a persuasive or opinion-based piece of writing. When you are writing in different styles, you will likely want to use one that is specific to that style.

The graphic organizer has two important pieces that students often struggle with when writing:

So, What Did You Learn?

In this lesson you learned about the prewriting phase of the writing process.

Did I Remember To...