Assignment #6 Chapter 3 Writing strategies and skills

In ‘Writing strategies and skills’, Prof. Tompkins divides writers into two categories: novice writers and capable writers. She says that novice writers “…lack knowledge about the writing process and have few strategies and skills available to use while they are writing (Tompkins, 2008, p.55)”. Then, what kind of things that capable writers are capable to do? She also gives some characteristics of capable writers. According to her, capable writers are capable of considering the purpose of writing and the audience when they write something. They can brainstorm ideas and organize them to develop communication writing. They can use various types of forms for each of different writing genres. Also, they can evaluate themselves’ works and correct them, using proper strategies and skills. Of course these characteristics would enhance results of the writing project. According to these characteristics, capable writers are prone to organize the ideas and capable of making their works for effective communication. For these effects happen, the writer should be able to see the written works in terms of big context. This means that capable writers can see the whole structure of the work because they know how to use the strategies and skills to construct it. This point can be proven by the author’s statement that “… the most significant difference between capable and less capable writers is their strategy use, it’s essential that children learn about writing strategies (Tompkins, 2008, p.56)”.
Then, she explains writing strategies and skills. She says that we can use skills to do something unconsciously and automatically whereas strategies should be learned precisely. There are some steps of writing strategies given by her: generating, organizing, visualizing, monitoring, playing with language, revising, proofreading, evaluating. Out of these procedures, I think that organizing step is the most important part for novice writers to learn because they don’t have a sense of organized work yet. This is for making a proper structure of the entire work and goes with the entire process of writing to keep the work well-structured. For the next, she suggests some writing skills which the children can use, and there are six of them; Structuring skills, Mechanical skills, Language skills, Reference skills, Handwriting skills, and computer skills. Among these skills, I think that reference skills are the most important to learn for the children who are novice writers. For a writer, it is very important to comprehend others’ works and interpret the information into their own opinion. Thus, good/capable writers should be able to use outside references properly and easily.

Reference:Tompkins, G. E. (2008). Teaching Writing: Balancing Process and Product. NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

Here are some interesting articles about this chapter.
http://www.all4ed.org/files/WritingNext.pdf

Response to Nan-Hee Jung:
In this chapter also she mention about Tompkins states " The position in this book is that teachers have the responsibility to teach children how to write, and part of that responsibilty is teaching children the strategies and skills that capable writers use. Although it is true that children learn many things inductively through meaningful literacy ecperiences, instruction is important" (Tompkins, 2008). And she totally agree with this opinion. And she understand that students have different skills and ability, thus teacher need to consider about students gap and teachers should help students learn the processes, strategies, and skills for writing instruction.