What your students write about is one of the most important decisions you make in teaching writing. To a large degree, it defines (1) what you teach about writing, and (2) how you teach writing. Put simply, we can’t leave what our students write about to chance.
By the way, if you need a system and methodology to teach multi-paragraph writing, be sure to check out Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay on the homepage. You will get twice the results in half the time, and you will create smiles on your students’ faces while you do so.
What Is a Beginning Multi-Paragraph Writer?
According to most state writing standards, multi-paragraph writing is a fourth-grade standard. In other words, by the end of fourth grade, students should be competent multi-paragraph writers. However, on released samples of student writing from state writing assessments, most of the best third-grade writers use a nice and natural multi-paragraph form. And that is INDEPENDENT writing! That nice and natural multi-paragraph form is what these third graders choose to do when left to their own devices.
Where are your students in their multi-paragraph writing career? Are they just beginning, or are they highly skilled? Here’s a model to help teachers gain their bearings and put things in perspective.
✈ Stage 1: Beginning Multi-Paragraph Writers: ♦ Level 1 ♦ Level 2 ♦ Level 3 ♦ Level 4 ♦ Level 5
✈ Stage 2: Competent Multi-Paragraph Writers: ♦ Level 6 ♦ Level 7 ♦ Level 8 ♦ Level 9 ♦ Level 10
✈ Stage 3: Skilled Multi-Paragraph Writers: ♦ Level 11 ♦ Level 12 ♦ Level 13 ♦ Level 14 ♦ Level 15
Once again, this page is primarily devoted to “Beginning Multi-Paragraph Writers,” but it certainly has relevance for “Competent Multi-Paragraph Writers.” Additionally, it has relevance for any teacher who is wasting class time by assigning writing tasks that don’t actively improve their students’ on-the-page writing, along with their understanding of writing.
The Two Basic Ways to Assign Topics
Teachers have two basic ways to assign topics:
1. The teacher chooses what students write about.
2. The students choose what they write about.
Of course, it’s not quite that simple. Let’s say that the teacher assigns one of these topics:
1. Write about something interesting that happened over your weekend.
2. Tell us about your weekend.
Although the teacher has assigned the general topic, the students are still choosing the specific topic. That’s the reality of most topics that students write about, including all topics that students write about on writing assessments.
Here are three released writing prompts from state writing assessments that illustrate different levels of specificity:
✈ Grade 3: Kentucky: You were invited to a sleepover for one of your good friends. You are really excited and cannot wait to go. After showing the invitation to your mother, she reminds you that Grandmother from another state is coming in for an overnight visit the same day. Task: Write a letter to your friend explaining why you cannot attend the sleepover. Describe your feelings and something you and your friend could do together at another time.
✈ Grade 4: Texas: Write a composition about the best thing that has happened to you.
✈ Grade 4: Tennessee: Forgetting can cause problems. Think about a day when you forgot something. Task: Before you begin to write, think about what you forgot and what happened. Now, write a story about what happened the day you forgot something.
These prompts alone contain an enormous amount of information about how to teach beginning multi-paragraph writers, so much that I can’t even cover it all here.
Assigning Writing vs. Teaching Writing
Early in my teaching career, when I asked teachers how to improve my third and fourth grade ELL students’ writing, many teachers recommended those little tan journals: “Kids like to write in them.” I guess these teachers didn’t understand what I meant by improve my students’ writing. I wanted clear, concrete, objective, substantial multi-paragraph improvement.
A year is a long time, and if your students struggle with multi-paragraph writing, you can easily transform your students into competent multi-paragraph writers in that year. But to achieve this goal, one must approach teaching writing with a strong purpose and intent.
Teachers must focus this strong purpose and intent on all of these aspects of teaching writing:
1. What they want to teach their students.
2. What they are required to teach their students.
3. How they teach writing—i.e., their systems, routines, strategies, curriculums, theories, and methodologies.
4. How to use their time wisely.
5. How to meet the needs of their students.
6. How to monitor and evaluate writing progress.
7. What their students write about.
All of these aspects of teaching writing are important, but we are focused on the last one here.
Why Multi-Paragraph Writing Is Important: The Commission Says that Students Need to Write More
In “The Neglected ‘R’: The Need for a Writing Revolution” (2003), The National Commission on Writing made various recommendations, including these two: 1) “The amount of time students spend writing should be at least doubled,” and 2) “Writing should be assigned across the curriculum.”
The reality is that it’s difficult to have even young students write more (as much as needed) if they don’t have at least some skill with multi-paragraph writing. I’ve found that to be true even in second grade.
To be clear, I don’t demand or even encourage formulaic writing. I simply want my students to have a good idea of where to indent. When students have a good feeling of where to indent, they are in control of their writing, and they are in control of what they are saying. If students don’t know where to indent, they are probably creating stream-of-consciousness writing. This kind of writing usually rambles endlessly and doesn’t make its ideas clear.
Naturally effective multi-paragraph writers have internalized two concepts: 1) A paragraph is a whole in itself, but it’s also a part of a whole composition, 2) The word paragraph is both a noun and a verb. If students haven’t internalized these two concepts on a kinesthetic level, they don’t understand anything about paragraphs in real writing.
How to Teach Multi-Paragraph Writing to Beginners?
All over this website, I link to systems, routines, resources, and eBooks on how to teach writing. Many of these materials focus on how to teach writing across the curriculum. Of course, Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay is the foundation and framework for everything I do in teaching writing. It truly is the missing piece of the puzzle that makes teaching multi-paragraph writing.
Although I can’t cover everything related to teaching writing here, I will present a few ideas that relate specifically to teaching multi-paragraph writing to beginners. To be clear, my goal is always to get students to internalize multi-paragraph writing so that they become highly effective natural paragraph writers. I want my students to feel when they should indent as they write because students who can do this can stay in control of their writing.
1. Persistency, Consistency, Repetition, and Variety: When teaching beginning multi-paragraph writers, use persistency, consistency, repetition, and variety. To be clear, it is a process, and it takes time to get students to internalize natural multi-paragraph writing. Because of this, teachers need to keep things novel and interesting and always moving forward.
2. Prewriting: Teach prewriting consistently if not constantly. Teach students how to grasp the whole before they start writing. Stop thinking that students must directly translate their prewriting into their multi-paragraph writing. If you are teaching prewriting consistently, the main goal is to teach students how to divide a topic into pieces so that they can grasp the whole. As students write, they learn to feel all of the new divisions (paragraphs) as they write. Of course, their prewriting also serves as a guide.
3. Scaffold Prewriting: Initially, scaffold the prewriting as needed to get your entire class writing. Don’t leave half of the class behind. You want to create a classroom full of writers so that writing takes on a life of its own. In reality, all beginning multi-paragraph writers need to develop great skill in GETTING IDEAS and ORGANIZING IDEAS. Of course, I am talking about skill in getting LOTS of ideas and organizing them FAST! With Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay as your foundation and framework, you will have a class full of amazing multi-paragraph writers in no time!
4. Writing Prompt Breakdown: Teach prompt breakdown. To be clear, teaching prompt breakdown is a part of teaching prewriting. We want our students to be able to correctly breakdown writing prompts so that they can generate ideas and organize ideas that are related to the prompts. When it’s time for a writing assessment, you will be thrilled that you spent time breaking down some of these Released Writing Assessment Prompts.
5. Teach Writing Across the Curriculum: Be sure to read Nine Strategies for Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum and combine that knowledge with Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay. You will create the best writers you have ever taught—quickly and easily!
What Should My Beginning Multi-Paragraph Writers Write About?
The more your students are true multi-paragraph beginners, the more you should have your students write about topics that they are experts on. Your students are experts on their personal experiences, their personal opinions, and various common topics. Due to the nature of writing assessments, nearly all of the Released Writing Assessment Prompts are topics that your students are experts on. However, many of these prompts are not easy to break down. You may want to start more simply.
Essays: The term essay is frequently thrown around as a generic term. Aldous Huxley, a famous essayist, said, “The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.” While that is true, it’s also a bit more complicated than that. An essay communicates a personal understanding, interpretation, or perspective. As an example, traditionally, most writing assessments have required essays. If the prompt did not require an imaginative story, it required an essay. Think about it: A traditional writing assessment involves four things: 1) a student, 2) a prompt, 3) a blank piece of paper, and 4) a pencil. In short, the student is the source of all the ideas, so unless it’s a story, it requires the student’s personal understanding, interpretation, or perspective.
The Four Main Genres: Every whole composition that your students write will primarily be one of these four main genres: 1) expository 2) narrative 3) descriptive, or 4) argument.
Division: The Heart of Multi-Paragraph Writing: Students learn to write by (1) prewriting, (2) writing, (3) rewriting, and (4) publishing. However, students learn to create multi-paragraph writing by internalizing how to divide topics into paragraph size chunks. At least, that’s half the battle. Keep that in mind as you create writing assignments for your beginning multi-paragraph writers. Topics that require complex critical thinking are difficult to divide into clear paragraphs size blocks.
As you read over these types of writing, consider how you can help your students divide the topics you assign into paragraph size blocks.
1. Essays: Opinion, Persuasive, and Argument: We all have opinions, and we can all give reasons for why our opinions are correct. That’s argument. Most students can easily write down a few reasons why their lunchtime should not be reduced to make time for silent reading.
2. Essays: Personal Narrative: Personal narrative essays are great for teaching multi-paragraph writing because students are experts on their personal experiences. Initially, these essays will border on being informational narratives, but that’s a great place to start.
3. Essays: Reflective: Back in 1580, when Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) invented essay writing with his book Essais (1580), reflection was a core component. These days, most essays that contain a large amount of personal understanding or reflection are classified as “informal essays.” In the modern classroom, we could classify a large amount of reflective journal writing and learning-log writing as being reflective essays.
Reflective writing isn’t great for teaching multi-paragraph writing. The goal of reflective writing is to explore ones thinking and understanding, and in the process, possibly meander. The goal of reflective writing is at odds with effectively dividing a topic into paragraph size chunks.
4. Stories: Narrative Stories: Great imaginative stories require a natural paragraph style. In fact, one reason that teaching multi-paragraph writing is difficult is that our students spend so much time reading great narrative stories. These stories don’t follow the same rules that we teach. For this reason, formal multi-paragraph structure and great story writing are at odds with each other. Despite that conundrum, we must still teach our students to write multi-paragraph stories. I know that when I teach story writing, I’m also teaching many essential narrative-story concepts and techniques. Initially, the paragraphs are a bit blocky, as they are built around “first, next, then, and finally,” but that’s how we teach multi-paragraph story writing.
5. Informational, Expository, Reports, and Articles: These types of writing are great for teaching multi-paragraph writing. Of course, our students must have the required information in their brains or in front of them to write about. Students can write about two basic types of information:
a) Expert Knowledge: All students have expert knowledge on many different topics: their family, sports, what schools are, different types of games, etc.
b) Across the Curriculum: It’s easy to teach multi-paragraph writing across the curriculum if you scaffold the prewriting on the front board. Of course, if you don’t have an amazing methodology like Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay, it’s going to be far more difficult.
6. Letters: Business, Friendly, For a Transactional Purpose, etc.: Letters work well for teaching multi-paragraph writing because we usually write letters with a message in mind that easily breaks down into paragraph size ideas. Put simply, we don’t write a letter without knowing why we are writing a letter. Most letters are primarily 1) expository, 2) narrative, or 4) persuasive, opinion, argument.
7. Research Papers: Research papers are not appropriate for beginning multi-paragraph writers. On the other hand, we do want to introduce students to some of the “point patterns” early: e.g., PQE (point, quote, explanation).
More Ideas on What Your Beginning Multi-Paragraph Writers Should Write About
All of the above ideas are genre and format related. Here are a few more practical ideas that can help you get your students writing.
1. Personal Experiences, Personal Opinions, and Common Topics: Students are experts on these topics. As an example, students know what they did over their weekend. Teachers can choose the specific topics, or they can let students choose. If I’m letting my students choose, I usually tell them about the writing assignment in advance so that they can have a topic ready.
2. Released Writing Assessment Prompts: Nearly all of these Released Writing Assessment Prompts are personal-experience and personal-opinion prompts. The fact that these prompts were used on a writing assessment adds a layer of legitimacy and importance. Additionally, many of them are excellent writing prompts.
3. Topics Across the Curriculum: Most everything students learn across the curriculum can be divided up in a way that is it is easy to write about. Think: three steps, three reasons, three types of rocks, three of the 6Ws, cause/effect, compare/contrast, etc.
4. Prompts That Use Patterns of Organization: Be sure to see Appendix D and E in Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay, along with The Definitive List of Writing and Grammar Skills.
Use the Term “Whole Composition”
I encourage all multi-paragraph teachers to introduce their students to the term “whole composition.” By definition, it communicates to students that their multi-paragraph writing is a whole that is made up of parts. Although I initially did not like the term, I now use it routinely, especially when discussing aspects of writing that apply to most types of multi-paragraph writing. Put simply, I don’t want my students to think what we are discussing applies only to the type of writing we are currently discussing. The term whole composition refers to all forms of multi-paragraph writing.
Should I Let My Students Write About Whatever They Want to Write About?
Although I still let my students choose their own topics from time to time, I don’t do it as much as I used to. In short, I’ve learned how to teach writing far more strategically. I largely teach writing while teaching subject content across the curriculum. Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay is the foundation and framework that allows me to do this.
However, I do believe that students should be able to look at writing and the world in a way in which they see that most everything is worth writing about. As an example, I’ve read fascinating student essays about chairs. When students view writing this way, they view themselves as true authors. Furthermore, they see writing as an artistic tool for reflecting on and experiencing life, and that writing has intrinsic value.
When Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) reinvented writing with his book Essais (1580), this is the kind of writing he was doing. My students weren’t aware of Montaigne when they chose to write about chairs, but I can only assume Montaigne would have approved, as he wrote an essay about thumbs.
To be clear, most students did not write about chairs. Most students wrote about things that kids tend to write about: their lives, their interests, etc. I still have my students write about that stuff, but I am usually teaching and targeting a genre when they do.
I do want to point out a problem that I have come across when I let my students write about whatever they want. I first noticed this problem when I was looking over the Timed Writing System, and I was quite surprised at what I saw.
Problem: Some students don’t challenge themselves at all. They may choose the same topic repeatedly or approach slightly different topics the same way every single time. Although students should begin their multi-paragraph writing career simply, they must also challenge themselves to keep moving forward. Keep an eye out for this.
