Writing Instruction

I remember very little about the writing instruction I received in my K-12 education.  My earliest memory of writing instruction was in either 3^rd or 4^th grade.  I was asked to write a paragraph about my favorite animal.  Having very little other instruction, I found an encyclopedia, and copied the entry about leopards.  My teacher easily saw right through my passage, and I learned very quickly about the concept and consequences of plagiarism.  My only other memories involving writing instruction were in my high school years.  For most of these, I can only remember dreading writing assignments, because writing well didn’t make sense to me.  I don’t remember having good models, or direct instruction about creating compositions.  My senior year, I was assigned an independent author study.  The culmination of this study was to be a 5-page paper (which was a lot for someone who had never really written before).   Needless to say, I struggled through the entire paper.  When my teacher returned it to me, it was riddled with red marks.  This made it easy for me to decide that writing would never become my favorite subject.

It wasn’t until I started college that I really began to understand the nuances of writing.  Like every other new college student, I had to take a freshman level research writing class.  Throughout this class, my professor heavily supported me and other students through writing papers for our college classes.  She gave us plenty of examples, and walked us through the writing process.  Through this class, and the overabundance of essays and papers I had to write during my undergrad, I began to understand the process of composition.

Within my early writing experiences, I cannot recall teachers using many scaffolding strategies.  Even though language was never an obstacle for me, I still struggled with learning to write because of a lack of support.   In college, I was fortunate enough to have professors who could walk me through learning to write.  My research-writing teacher scaffolded by providing multiple examples, and by taking me through the process step by step.  In my final project for my class, she checked in after planning, drafting, editing, and revising to provide feedback about how to improve.  These strategies were crucial in helping me learn to write.