How to Teach Writing: 5 Simple Shifts to Transform Your Writing Block

Most of the teachers I work with, both at my elementary school site and those I interact with through my work with the National Writing Project, confess to not having enough time in their tight daily schedules for writing instruction. 

Worse, what little time they do have gets squandered or cut entirely in favor of more reading or math lessons. And those few rare teachers who do have a protected writing block are often at a loss. They want to know how to teach writing effectively, but aren’t sure what to focus on. Should you focus on a specific writing genre? Grammar? Spelling? Penmanship?

Without a clear plan in place, well-meaning teachers fall back on one of two extremes: 

• Disconnected, plug and play daily grammar worksheets.  They’re easy to assign and grade but feel more like busywork and never actually transfers into student writing. 
• Elaborate, over-scaffolded writing projects. These focus too heavily on a picture perfect end result and are packed with prescriptive sentence frames almost to the point where nearly all writer voice and choice has been snuffed out. They look great on a bulletin board, but we all know the teacher did all the heavy lifting when it came to the actual thinking, planning, and organizing. 

Sound familiar? It doesn’t have to be this way. 

Did you know that in their 2012 guide, Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences recommends that students, especially those in elementary school from 1^st grade and up, need a minimum of an hour a day of devoted writing time? 

One full hour. 

While that much time spent on writing may feel like an unattainable luxury for most of us, here’s the good news. That hour can and should be divided between direct instruction on specific writing strategies and techniques and time spent implementing and practicing those writing strategies.

The great news is that writing doesn’t just have to happen during your ELA block. Students can and should be writing ALL day long. Across every content area and subject. Yes, even during Math and PE. 

Shift 1: How to Teach Writing By Deconstructing Essential Skills

Much like athletes, kids can’t become great writers if they have never been taught or practiced the individual micro-skills that go into the craft. 

The formula is simple: Learn a skill → Practice a skill. Boiled down like that it seems obvious, right? But teaching and practicing writing does require you to analyze a final writing piece you want your students to write, then decompose it into its essential building block skills. 

For example: If you want your students to write a narrative story that includes dialogue, the students must understand and practice these specific concepts. . . 

• ID the actual lines of dialogue by differentiating between what is said out loud versus narration 
• Use quotation marks around the dialogue 
• Identify the dialogue tag (he said/she said) 
• Place the dialogue tag before, after, or in the middle of the dialogue 
• Use commas to set off the dialogue from the dialogue tag
• Capitalize the first word of a line of dialogue
• Understand the capitalization rules for dialogue that is interrupted
• Use ellipses to show a speaker trailing off in thought
• Use a hyphen to show a speaker being abruptly cut off

Once you’ve broken the core writing concept down, practice each skill independently, starting with the most basic and working your way up to the most complex. By doing this, you’ll not only fill in learning gaps but build writing confidence at the same time. 

How I Teach This in Real Life:

To teach kids how to identify lines of dialogue versus narration, I use a shared reading activity. I’ll read aloud all of the narration for a story. When I come to a line of dialogue, the whole class will stand to read the dialogue. They’ll sit down when they see the closing quotation marks. If you pick a story that has a lot of dialogue in it (and represents all of the different ways authors can write dialogue), the constant stand-sit motion keeps kids engaged and moving, all while building visual awareness of punctuation. If your kids have a printed copy of the story, they can highlight the quotation marks and underline the tags. 

Use quotation marks around the dialogue

Use commas to set off the dialogue from the dialogue tag

Place the dialogue tag before, after, or in the middle of the dialogue 

To teach punctuation placement (quotation marks and commas in dialogue) and dialogue tag placement, I love using physical manipulation. When kids write by hand or type, the words suddenly feel permanent, stuck to the page and impossible to move. But physically arranging sentence parts, quotation marks, and commas allows the kids to focus purely on structural grammar rules without getting bogged down by figuring out what to say. 

Shift 3: Build Stamina with Daily, Low-Stakes Writing Activities

Students must practice writing in order to get better at writing. But if every writing piece you assign takes weeks to complete and is worth a huge part of their grade, your students will not only dread writing, but begin to avoid it altogether. 

To build writing stamina, we have to lower their anxiety (the affective filter). Here’s how I do this in my own classroom and during my writing intervention class:

Stop grading writing. 

If everything is graded, every assignment feels high-stakes, do or die and that can feel overwhelming to struggling students, language learners, and high achieving perfectionists. I’ll go into this more in the next section, but my general rule of thumb is that if you have time to grade every writing piece your students do, they aren’t writing enough. 

Create a space that fosters and feeds creativity. 

Keep an ample supply of both lined and unlined paper or writing journals nearby, and plenty of pencils and art supplies. Don’t forget to have a pencil sharpener handy along with your rules and procedures for using it. I’d also recommend purchasing whiteboard clipboards and thin whiteboard markers, which come in handy all day long. 

I also utilize distinct classroom seating zones around the room. We gather at the carpet for direct instruction, sit at our desks for independent work, snag a spot on a stool or storage bench for small group collaboration. The flexible environment keeps  kids comfortable and thinking creatively.

Rethink What “Writing Time” Means. 

Brainstorming, pondering what ifs, collaborating with peers, selecting or playing with new words, rereading mentor texts, thinking, revising, and physically manipulating and punctuating sentences are all just as important as actually putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboards. 

In my class, taking 1 minute to build a word bank based on an image or topic counts as writing time. And oral storytelling is just as valuable as writing a story by hand. 

Embrace a Non-Linear Writing Process. 

The real writing process isn’t a neat, straight line; it’s a web. Writers move in and out of the various stages as needed. We might pick a topic, draft a paragraph, share it with a peer for feedback, then jump back to conduct more research. Or we get feedback on our writing plan before we ever begin writing. Sometimes, my students start with the artwork, then use it as a visual anchor to write our poem or story. 

Keep your writing activities short and fun. 

If your goal is to get kids excited about writing and lower “blank page” anxiety, keep daily writing activities quick, engaging, and structured like mini-skill builders. Here are a few of my favorite low-stakes writing activities to get kids moving and thinking:

• Take a “fieldtrip” to the cafeteria so kids can practice writing with all 5 senses. 
• Practice describing the image. 
• Build a word bank based on a random word, image, or song. 
• Engage in a grammar scoot around the room. 
• Steal a long sentence from a text you’ll be reading, then decompose it into short sentences for your students so practice sentence combining. 
• Physically sort ideas into hula hoops labeled with different categories. 
• Scramble the sentences of a paragraph, then ask students to reorganize the paragraph correctly. 
• Act out a scene before writing it. 
• Recall memories. 
• Rewrite a passage from a different perspective. 
• Write a diary entry from a historical figure’s point of view.
• Write a poem about a science topic you’re learning. 
• Change the lyrics to a song to match a topic you’re learning.
• Punctuate an unpunctuated writing passage.
• Underline the dependent clauses in complex sentences.

For more information on low-stakes writing activities, check out these resources and TPT products below.

Shift 4: Write for Authentic Purposes & Audiences

In our haste to teach our students how to write well, there is one lesson that is often forgotten, which is this: 

Writing, at its very core, only has but one purpose . . . to communicate something to someone.

Writers write for a real reason. They might be:

• Recording notes or memories
• Capturing their thoughts and emotions
• Passing down knowledge
• Entertaining through storytelling
• Moving a reader to take action

There is always a point to writing. And there must be an audience, known or unknown, even if that audience is the writer themselves.

Unfortunately, the writing assignments traditionally given in school have no true point or goal. Worse, they have no authentic audience to communicate with, which means they have no intrinsic reason to revise their work.

Consider this: if the only person reading the writing piece is a teacher whose sole reason for reading it is to judge it and assign a meaningless point value, then why write at all?

As you set out to revamp your writing lessons, keep the following questions in mind: What is it that you’re trying to communicate? With whom? Why? 

Swapping Traditional Assignments for Authentic Writing

Instead of writing a book report or summarizing a story . . . Have students write and record short book talk commercials for their peers? 

• Purpose? To persuade someone to pick up the book and read it. 
• Audience? The kids at the school.

Instead of writing an informational essay about economics . . . Write illustrated picture books about currency! 

• Purpose? To teach the history and value of money. 
• Audience? 2nd graders who are currently learning how to count money.

Instead of writing a persuasive essay . . . Have them advocate for a real need on campus, like a new club or playground equipment.

• Purpose? To explain the need for a new club and persuade someone to approve or fund it. 
• Audience? The principal or PTA.

When students stop writing for a teacher’s red pen and gradebook and start writing for a real purpose and an authentic audience, everything changes. Suddenly kids take more pride in their work. They become genuinely willing to revise or polish their writing in order to clarify their message for the reader. Especially if they get a real response or reaction from their reader. 

CONCLUSION

There you have it. Learning to write well doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, deep thought, analysis, and reflection. But above all, it requires giving your students permission to take risks, be creative, and mess up without the fear of a red pen hovering over their paper.

Provide your young writers with beautiful mentor texts to devour so they can study how the experts move. Make space within your jam-packed day for short, low-stakes play. Give them an authentic purpose and a real audience to write for. When we shift our instruction away from rigid, high-stakes tasks and focus on how to teach writing as a functional, creative craft-building, we don’t just pass a test—we build confident writers and communicators.

So, teacher friends . . . Which of these 4 practices are you excited to try in your classroom? Drop a comment below!