Seven Steps to Successful Writing

Lori A. Dunn is an ESL teacher, instructional designer, and freelance
writer in New Westminster.

This resource is full of useful tips and advice for students in junior
and senior high school. The work, which is designed in the form of a
flip chart with seven tabs, guides them through the writing process from
concept to receiving feedback. The author, formerly a language arts
supervisor on school boards and now a private consultant and a writer,
has distilled the reams of information on writing into seven steps.

Step 1, “Why write?,” encourages students to delve into more
personal writing (e.g., journals and learning logs) along with their
regular writing assignments. The other steps stress the importance of
pre-writing, finding one’s own voice, and revision (as Foster states,
“[r]evision is the opportunity to walk up to what you’ve stated and
challenge it before anyone else can). Also included are tips on using
genre analysis as a strategy for written communication and suggestions
on how to begin a piece—especially when faced with writer’s block.

The teacher has not been forgotten. There is a rubric for analyzing a
student’s writing, for both the teacher and the student, and some
reproducible worksheets for classroom use.

Seven Steps to Successful Writing would be useful for every student to
have.