Rene Schillinger - The Process of Writing

Rene Schillinger is an educational consultant in New York who is dedicated to helping teachers improve their literacy instruction, including best practices relating to the teaching of writing. Writing is an important skill that is often not adequately taught in schools. As a vital life-skill that is important not only for succeeding in school, but the work world as well.
Learning to write isn't simply a question of grammar. While teaching proper sentence structure, appropriate use of tenses and punctuation is important, teaching writing must also include proper use of punctuation, paragraph structure, vocabulary, spelling, word choice, and other components of correct writing. For students to begin to understand that writing is a form of communication, they must first be taught the writing process. This process includes:

• Pre-writing – students gather information and begin to organize it into a cohesive unit. No matter the type of writing that is being done, this stage is the most important. The process includes brainstorming, reading, taking notes, and categorizing information.
• Writing – this stage is essentially an extension of the pre-writing process. The information that was gathering in the pre-writing stage is gathered and organized into a traditional format. This stage allows them to settle on the course the paper will take.
• Revising – this can include adding, deleting, rearranging, and substituting words, sentences, or even entire paragraphs. This helps them to make their writing more accurately represent their idea.
• Proofreading – in this stage, students are able to scan their writing for mistakes in grammar, punctuation, and spelling. It is important for the child to do this stage themselves in order to improve their writing over time.

There are many best practices related to the teaching of writing. Rene Schillinger is dedicated to helping teachers understand these practices and showing them how they can improve their instruction in writing.