Writing Like an Insider: Identifying as a Scholar

This morning, Dr. Lesley addressed the Llano Estacado Writing Alliance about Joining a Discourse Community as a Scholarly Writer. While that floats my boat personally, her ideas made me think about the writers I will encounter in the fall. Here are some ideas that I want to preserve and communicate. 

• Teachers of writing should write. I will be finding my voice as a writer. This will feed my instruction and support for students and teachers. 
• Writing Fluency is more complex than reading fluency. (Lesley, 2021 presentation)

 Hmmm. Here's the definition that Dr. Lesley shared with us:

Writing Fluency: The ability to produce written language rapidly, appropriately, cognitively, and coherently (Latif, 2013)

Students need to become aware of the components of their writing fluency. Our instructional activities should be explicit about the goals and the ways in which we achieve writing fluency. We want our students to begin writing after diffusing the prompt or assignment, not from a disjointed stream of consciousness, but from a capacity that considers deep meaning and the genre characteristics and conventions that will accurately and effectively deliver the message to their audience. They need to know how to get that kind of writing fluency going automatically. 

• Each writing even it a unique rhetorical event (Lesley, 2021 presentation).  

That's why it feels like you are starting over each time. That's why there is no formula. The rhetorical situation will always be different. Do we let kids know that this is true for everyone and every writing task? Do they know the struggle is normal and they are not alone? 

• Writing is inquiry (Lesley, 2021 presentation).  

YAAAAS. It is always new. We are always rethinking and rewriting - learning all the while. Writing is thinking made visible in ink, graphite, or binary code. 

• We learn to write and investigate our thinking through writing (Lesley, 2021 presentation).

How do you learn to do something? You get in there and do it. You learn about the something and a lot more about yourself. 

•  Scholarly Voice: scholarly voice is about contextualizing the research, situating the study and the researcher personally (Lesley, 2021 presentation). 

We write so they can see our face and hear our voice and know our personality. The way we write exposes our thinking and our personality. Do the kids know it doesn't have to be stilted or boring? 

• Introspective writing helps students move into a creative space where they are free to play with language, capture descriptive details, elaborate on the seemingly insignificant and juxtapose disparate ideas against each other. Introspection allows the writer's self to be present in all facets of the writing act (Lesley, in press). 

Wow. That's writing like an insider. So here's my questions to guide instruction in the fall. 

1. How do we help kids write like an insider for particular genres if we don't teach them how to read a text for how it is structured and the techniques the writer is using? How do we teach them to dissect a text not just for comprehension, but for CREATION for their own purposes? I need to create lessons and opportunities for this work...to go beyond comprehension to CRAFT. Our Texas ELAR standards have two Knowledge and Skills statements for craft. One is to analyze craft. The other is to USE craft for their own meaningful products and performances. 

2. How do we help kids write like an insider if they never read the kind of stuff we are asking them to write? We need more mentor texts that kids have written.