16 Concepts That Teachers Need to Know to Help Their Students Become Better Writers

Are you a teacher that wants to help your students become better writers? Well, you have come to the right place. In this piece, we will discuss 16 writing concepts that teachers need to know and understand in order to make their students better writers.

Argumentative Writing- A style of writing that uses forms of reasoning, persuasion, as well as factual and other evidence to support one or more claims about a topic or text.

Drafting Stage- A step in the writing process in which students externalize their ideas in writing. Informal writing such as journal entries, open-ended responses, and reading strategy applications generally stop at this stage, while formal writing such as research papers continue beyond this step to all stages of the writing process.

Editing Stage- A step in the writing process focused on checking grammar and formatting.
Writing Process- A progression within the act of writing that is comprised of several stages including drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.

Formal Writing- A type of writing commonly associated with long-term projects, such as research papers or inquiry-based projects, which are usually evaluated through scoring guides also referred to as rubrics.

Informal Writing- A type of writing in the drafting stage which occurs naturally in classroom activities that involve writing short responses to an open-ended question or writing journal entries.

What is Inquiry-Based Writing- A type of formal writing used for engaging in inquiry-based learning, creative thinking, and research in content areas.

Recursive Writing Process- Within the multiple stages in the writing process, students do not simply move from one step to the next; rather, they revisit each step to complete their writing.

Revising Stage- A step in the writing process in which students modify the content based on feedback provided by peers, teachers, or their own opinions.

Publishing Stage- A step in the writing process, before submission to the teacher for evaluation, in which students review their written work, proofread, and make final edits.

Orthography- The system for the standard use of symbols for writing in a language; the conventional rules of spelling and writing in a language.

Emergent Writers- Learners in their beginning stages of writing. They are often young children engaged in experimentations with the written language, through scribbling for example, to convey a written message.

Creative Writing- A style of writing which is often rooted in the writer’s experiences, including forms such as fiction, drama, and poetry.

Composing- The author’s viewpoints on the various aspects of writing, including the expressive, poetic or imaginative, and expository elements.

Recursive Nature of Writing- The back-and-forth quality of writing. Writing is necessarily a recursive process: as the writer modifies his/her work, they often go back in their writing to rephrase or add new elements to the previously written material.

Rehearsal- A stage in the writing process in which the writer mentally reviews and tests out different versions of a piece of work before making a final selection.

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