Over 95% of America’s eighth-grade students and high school seniors are proficient writers, with one in four writing at an advanced level, according to results of a nationwide test.

There is only one problem with the news clip above. It's not true. Compare that with the real headline and story, from an article in the New York Times on April 3, 2008:

In Test, Few Students Are Proficient Writers

About one-third of America’s eighth-grade students, and about one in four high school seniors, are proficient writers, according to results of a nationwide test released on Thursday.

The goal of The Writing Teacher blog is to move students in the U.S. from low writing proficiency to high proficiency over the next five to seven years, to make the first headline a reality.

Why writing?

Writing is not just a core skill (remember the three R's?), writing is a central 21^st Century skill. Proficient writers are able to

• Use critical, analytical, and creative thinking

• Organize their thinking

• Understand the writing task they are undertaking

• Use precise language and a variety of sentence structures to engage the audience

• Employ details, examples, and elaboration to support a main idea

• Use writing elements such as introduction, conclusion, sequence, and theme to clearly convey ideas 

• Master punctuation, spelling, grammar, and sentence structure with few errors

How is The Writing Teacher going to help?

We’re going to start by finding out what is working today. We want to provide teachers with free resources they can use to dramatically impact the writing of their students.

We’ll find experts, including teachers, researchers, and administrators, who are willing to write (in a blog) and talk about (in webinars) what they’ve observed that works. And we hope educators will watch, debate, and expand on what they present.

We’ll talk about teaching writing, assessing writing, traits of writing, processes of writing, inclusion of ELL and Special Ed students, how to help struggling writers, inspiring advanced writers, early writing programs, Elementary, Middle and Secondary school programs, how writing is taught in other countries, research and studies, common misconceptions about teaching writing, writing in varied content areas, what tools are available, and anything else we can find that is useful.

We’ll keep an eye out for state and federal legislation and executive actions. We’ll work with and prod national and state organizations.

A few upcoming postings:

• 6 research-based practices that improve writing

• working with learning disabled students in mainstream classes

• writing in the early grades

• from the college perspective, what are the biggest writing gaps in students entering college

• how is writing taught outside of the US, and what can we learn

We are expecting to publish about two articles a month. If you are interested in writing an article, please contact us at info@thewritingteacher.org.

In addition, we will maintain a calendar of writing events; see the Upcoming Events link under navigation. Please let us know any thoughts you might have on this topic.

There is a Readers React discussion area, which will let teachers, administrators, researchers, and parents raise issues that they want to see addressed.

We are starting a series of webinars on writing in January, and we hope to host an online writing conference later in 2009.

If you have tips, techniques, strategies, or thoughts, you can post comments, participate in the discussions, and obtain email updates if you join. (Membership is free; see above.)

One more note: We are thankful to our sponsors, LearningExpress, LLC, for all their assistance in getting the process started. Their eFolio™ writing improvement program instantly grades essays online and returns valuable diagnotistic data, allowing teachers to assign more writing projects to students and spend more time on planning and teaching rather than grading. We hope you consider using their services so that they can continue to support efforts like this.

Our aim is to make this a nation of thoughtful writers.

Mitch Weisburgh and Farimah Schuerman
Managing Partners
Academic Business Advisors, LLC
September 25, 2008