: Re: Assessing what writing skills are missing I recently wrote an answer on Parenting.SE about the process of learning how to read. There are distinct sets of skills that need to be mastered before

@Bryan361

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I'm not a professional teacher, but here are two thoughts, based upon homeschooling my kids and working with other children for many years:

1) Children often develop a mental capability before the physical capability that it's usually paired with. For example, children being weaned can be taught simple ASL hand signs (for "please," "thank you," "more," and "done") long before they can speak those words. Turning to writing, children can dictate a story/report long before they can write it down. Furthermore, children who are slow at learning handwriting (or are just slow at doing it) will often get discouraged about writing. The physical act of putting the words down on paper becomes a big barrier to kids like that. They conclude that they "stink at writing," when in fact they merely stink at handwriting. Teachers should look for this and seek ways to counter it. (For example, teach kids to type and to use voice-to-text programs.)

2) The second leading cause of trouble with writing (and with reading comprehension also) stems from an inability to outline. In the past, outlining was taught in school as a skill in itself. Despite a moronic emphasis on "proper" outline formatting [I, A, 1., a., 1), a), (1), (a), proper capitalization, etc.], which turned off many students (and teachers), it was a great thing to teach, because it taught you to organize your own thoughts and to recognize the organization in other people's thoughts. Nowadays, outlining is deemphasized as passe and time-consuming, which is ironic because word processing programs can handle the formatting of outlines, so all the person has to do is the thinking.

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