This presentation examines the necessity of encouraging writing across the curriculum areas. Writing activities have to be engaging, meaningful and help to develop the writing skills of the audience. These slides examine how and why one should teach writing across the curriculum.

1. Writing across the
curriculum
David R Cole

2. writing
• All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very
bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is
a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some
painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing
if one were not driven by some demon whom one can
neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell (1947)

3. Introduction
• Maintain the child in a
rich literacy environment
• Encourage a have-a-go
attitude – outside of the
comfort zone
• Do not over correct first
draft and expressive
attempts at writing
(allow for contingency)
• Scaffold lines of
development : i.e.
meaning, syntax,
spelling, handwriting
and context
• Make explicit
connections between
oral and written
language – give
ownership to the
writer…

4. The writing circle (genre theory)
From (Tas, 2004) Book chapter on genre theory

5. Transactional model of
writing development (Arnold,
1991)
• Writing development is not
a linear process
• It coincides with the
development of ‘the self’
and the ability to relate
aspects of yourself to
others
• Students may develop
quickly and regress equally
as quickly depending upon
psychological &
environmental factors
• At all stages of writing
development, support the
student’s work through
guided, modelled and
shared examples.

6. Essay on
transactional
model of w.d.

8. Experimental writing
• Reads back own writing
• Attempts familiar forms of
writing – lists, letters,
recounts, stories
• Writes using simplified oral
language structures
• Uses writing to convey
meaning
• Realises that print contains
a constant message
• Uses left to right and top to
bottom orientation
• Demonstrates one-to one
correspondence bet ween
written and spoken word
• Relies heavily on the most
obvious sounds of a word

9. Early writing
• Uses a range of familiar text
forms
• Chooses topics that are
personally significant
• Uses basic sentence structure
and varies sentence
beginnings
• Can explain in context some of
the purposes of using writing –
e.g. the use of a shopping list
• Experiments with words drawn
from different mediums in
writing
• Begins to develop editing skills
• Attempts to use punctuation
• Talks to others when planning
and revising work

10. Conventional writing
• Uses text forms to suit purpose and
audience
• Can explain why some text forms
may be more appropriate than
others to achieve a purpose
• Writes a range of text forms
including stories, reports,
procedures and expositions
• Uses a variety of simple,
compound and extended
sentences
• Groups sentences into paragraphs
• Selects vocabulary according to
purpose and audience
• Uses proof-reading and checklist
techniques to edit
• Punctuates correctly
• Uses a range of strategies for
planning, revising and publishing
written text

11. Proficient writing
• Selects text forms to suit purpose and audience, demonstrating control over
genre types
• Can state the goals of writing a text and can explain how well they have been
achieved
• Writes to define, clarify and develop ideas and expressive writing – poems,
reports, arguments
• Writes a topic sentence and can develop cohesive paragraphs
• Organises paragraphs logically
• Uses a variety of sentence structures appropriate to text form
• Uses a large repertoire of words, expresses meaning clearly
• Edits own writing
• Accurate use of punctuation
• Takes notes, selects and synthesises relevant information and plans sequence
Article on w.d.

12. Questions to ask ?
• In what ways do I plan a clear framework within which students can
express and order their ideas for writing?
• Do I focus on one or two aspects of writing at a time so that students
can practise new skills?
• Do I provide opportunities for students to discuss their
understandings of the writing process in problem solving sessions?
• Do I provide time for the students to reflect on what they know and to
think about what they need to know so that they have ownership and
control of their own writing development?
• Do I plan in advance so that I can collect a range of resources
including books, magazines, tapes, videos, CD ROMS and maps?
• Am I aware of the teaching points about writing that may be derived
from different texts?
• Have I planned opportunities for regular demonstrations in modelled
and shared writing sessions?
• What opportunities am I providing for students to pursue their own
personal writing as well as teacher directed activities?
• Have I allowed students to negotiate some aspects of the writing
program?

13. Purpose & writing forms
• To record feelings, observations etc
• Personal letters
• Reports
• Notes & jottings
• Poems
• Diaries
• Recounts
• To describe
• Character portraits
• Labels & captions
• Descriptions
• Advertisements
• To inform or advise
• Posters
• Scripts for news broadcasts
• Invitations
• Programs
• Minutes of meetings
• To persuade
• Advertisements
• Letters to the editor
• Cartoons
• Notes for a debate
• Discursive essays

14. Purpose & writing forms II
• To explore & maintain relationships with others
• Letters & Making requests
• Greeting cards & Questionnaires
• To predict or hypothesise
• Speculations about possible outcomes in other learning area topics
• Endings for stories
• Questions for research or interviews
• To make comparisons
• Charts & Note-making
• Essays, Diagrams &Graphs
• Descriptions
• To command or direct
• Recipes & Instructions How to make …
• stage directions
• Rules for games, safety, health
• To entertain or amuse
• Jokes, riddles
• Scripts for drama, puppet shows
• Stories & Poems
• Personal anecdotes
• To clarify thinking
• Note-taking for research
• Explanations of graphs, diagrams
• Jottings & Journal writing

15. More than purpose
• Good writing is Affective (from affect)
• Purpose is useful in that students are writing
for a reason, parallel to critical literacy which
enables writing for social change...
• However purpose and critical literacy are
useless unless the pupils want to write
• The teacher of writing should work on the
conditions whereby desire becomes apparent
in the writing of the pupils.
• This can be achieved through the linkage of
the writing with phenomena (realia) – objects,
scenarios and subjects, that are impinging on
the lives of the group.

16. What is the next line?
• I wandered lonely as a cloud
• That floats on high o'er vales and hills (Wordsworth)
• I was angry with my friend
• I told my wrath, my wrath did end (Blake)
• He lives the poetry that he cannot write
• The others write the poetry that they dare not realise
(Wilde)
• All the world’s a stage
• And all the men and women merely players
(Shakespeare)
• He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to
be read
• He wants to be learned by heart (Nietzsche)

17. Amsler (2004)
• Definition: The term affective literacy locates
a broad range of somatic, emotive responses
to reading a text. Affective literacy seeks out
the life principle, messy and complex,
threading through reading activities and
gestures toward bodily economies of reading
and transacting texts.
Affective literacy paper

18. Affective literacy (Cole, 2007)
• Affective engagement of the teacher. This is not a prescriptive
approach to teaching writing - the teacher must therefore find his or
her own passionate reasons for teaching the text in question.
• Affective engagement of the students (Seaton, 2002). The text that
teachers choose should tap into the social/cultural values of the
community to be ‘affective’.
• Advocating the pleasure in reading (Misson & Morgan, 2005). This is
where a relationship with the text is created by the reader and
maintained through education.
• Extracting affective themes from the text. These will provide the focus
for study and inquiry and constitute organising principles for lesson
plans and units of work.
• Designing pedagogies that effectively handle the affective themes of
the text. The teachers using this approach need to maintain the
impact and power of the texts by becoming confident in using textual
and social affects (Fiumara, 2001; Forgas, 2001) to enhance
classroom experience.

19. The Monster (M. Shelley)

20. Wide Sargasso Sea
• Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in
the Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone
wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead
flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath
the tree ferns, tall as forest trees, the light was green.
Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not
to be touched. One was snaky looking, another like an
octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves
hanging from a twisted root.
• Rhys, 2000, p. 6

21. Writing & discourse
• In becoming literate, we are drawn to consider the
relationship between the individual, language and
experience. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Misson
(2001) suggests that in writing we are creating
ourselves. "We write ourselves into being" (p. 6). We
are creating a world. Moreover, we write with "pre-
existent purposes, we write to express things" and in
doing so "we are constantly surprising ourselves" (p. 8).
Becoming literate paper

22. Writing & literature
• The fascination with literature at the heart of the
English curriculum is also a fascination with the
diversity and commonality of human individuality — an
individuality that is based in different ways in which we
all intersect with time and space and in how the
immediate social and cultural influences that surround
us shape and inform our experiences so that we are
different, but also to share the differences with and
through common cultural resources, Neelands (2001).
Writing & literature paper

23. The struggling writer
• Will need to have more scaffolded
interventions – e.g. grammar instruction, extra
vocabulary, spelling help, writing coherence
and direction
• Should work more regularly in joint
construction of text
• Must be set simple writing tasks, not
homework
• Cannot be expected to work on differentiated
tasks, e.g. hybrid genres or a follow on type
strategy when one writing piece leads to
another
• Should not spend too long writing on their
own, so need more oral input

24. The gifted writer
• Do not repeat the same exercise
• Use your imagination when setting tasks
• Use hybrid and follow on strategies, e.g. write
a report that uses poetic language or separate
journal entries that document an adventure in
the desert
• Challenge the writer by setting high standards
of editing and publication
• Make the gifted writer the class newspaper
editor
• Allow them to work on their own
• Point out new and exciting texts from which
they may draw inspiration...

25. Books that bite
• Book choice is vital to engage
the students in the writing
process
• Reading material should
enable children to make
specific and well fashioned
references to styles of writing
and the choices that writers
make in their literature (e.g.
the use of a protagonist or
narrative voice)
• Show children the diverse and
varied nature of reading and
writing possibilities to engage
their imagination in language
activities
“There are no great writers,
only great re-writers”.

26. Cthulhuic Literacy?
• Sometimes the tone and mood are the most important
elements of a story...
• Concepts add shape & form to text (the unknown)
• The real contains unexpected surprises
• Everyday life is not boring.
• The unconscious has a dark side...
• You never know how your work will be viewed by
posterity
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the
strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown (Lovecraft,
1926)

27. ?
• Samuel Beckett (1932) : I shall
state silences more competently
than ever a better man spangled
the butterflies of vertigo...

28. Are you a writer?
A Mushroom of Glass

29. Endnote
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1964):
“Sentences emerged that
frightened me: they
were like real
centipedes; they
swarmed with syllables
and letters, span out
their diphthongs and
made double
consonants hum” (p.
118).
• Good writing makes
language come to life
• Encourage the children
to experiment and feel
words as living
objects…

30. references
Amsler, M. (2004). Affective literacy: Gestures of reading in the Later Middle Ages. University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, retrieved October 11, 2005, from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/
essays_in_medieval_studies/v018/18.1amsler.html
Arnold, R. (1991). Writing Development: Magic in the Brain. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Beckett, S. (1932). Belacqua, in Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Available online
at:http://www.poemhunter.com/quotations/famous.asp?people=Samuel%20Beckett
Cole, D.R. (2007). Teaching Frankenstein and Wide Sargasso Sea Using Affective Literacy. English in
Australia, Volume 42, Number 2, pp. 69-77.
Education Department of Western Australia. (1997). Writing Continuum. Port Melbourne: Rigby Heinmann.
Fiumara, G. C. (2001). The mind’s affective life; a psychoanalytic and philosophical inquiry. Hove: Brunner-
Routledge.
Forgas, J. P. (Ed.), (2001). The handbook of affect and social cognition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Lovecraft, H.P. (1926). The Call of Cthulhu. Available at:
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thecallofcthulhu.htm
Misson, R. (2001). What are we creating in Creative Writing? Paper presented at the National Joint
Conference of the Australian Association for Literacy Education and the Australian English Teachers
Association, Hobart, Tasmania.
Misson, R., & Morgan, W. (2005). Beyond the Pleasure principle? Confessions of a Critical Literacy
Teacher. English in Australia, Issue 144: Summer 2005, pp. 17-25.
Neelands, J. (2001). Remember, we are human. Keynote address, National Joint Conference of the
Australian Association for Literacy Education and the Australian Association for Teachers of English,
Hobart, Tasmania.
Orwell, G. (1947). Why I write. Available online at: http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/whywrite.htm
Rhys, J. (2000). Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin Classics.
Sartre, J. P. (1964). The words. New York: Fawcett.
Seaton, A. (2002). Four Curricular Forms: Supporting Literacy in Middle-School Programming. In B.
Gordon (Ed.), Practical Literacy Programming (pp. 93-107). Newtown: Primary English Teaching
Association.
Tas (2004). Tasmania English web site. Available at: http://www.tas.gov.au/English