Writing Frameworks: Easy-to-Use Structures for creating Confident Successful Writers

Luke Lawson is a teacher and administrator in Vancouver, B.C.

Writing Frameworks is a reasonably good resource for teachers seeking to
help students gain more confidence in writing. In the author’s own
words, “writing frameworks have been designed to help students think,
before they write, in ways that will help them to compose factual,
non-fiction texts—a writing genre that many students find
difficult.”

The book examines two key stages: the pre-writing framework, which is
designed to help students with processing information and thinking
crucially; and the draft component, which is designed to help students
achieve confidence in their writing.

Writing Frameworks is essentially a series of reproducible worksheets.
This may seem convenient for teachers, but the road to critical thinking
does not begin with worksheets. While the author states that the
frameworks are not designed to restrict literacy or creativity, the
worksheets more or less do precisely that. Readers would have been
better served had Whitehead focused more attention on showing educators
how to help students write outside of the prescribed boundaries, in
addition to examining external non-fiction sources in more detail.