Writing Essentials - Chapter 1

I concurred with many of the shared beliefs on writing found on page 9. Especially there are lots of ways to prewrite, direct teaching of skills is part of writers workshop, peer conferencing needs to be modeled and done well to be useful, students need time to think before they write, and last but not least, not all writing needs to be graded. I totally agree that teaching writing by focusing on the parts and spending weeks teaching sentence fluency or word choice, is not how writers work. I had never thought of writing in this way, but it makes sense to look at a whole piece of writing then look at the parts and connect them back to the whole. I think I have been doing that, I just didn't see it that way in my head. I connected with this sentence found of page 15. "Whole-to-part-to-whole is much easier for teachers and students than part-to-whole-to-part."