The Power of Extreme Writing

How do I help my students become eager and fluent writers? (ASCD Arias)

Diana Cruchley

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781416620877
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Are your students excited about writing? Do you want them to be?

Do you want them to ask for more writing opportunities and assignments? Do you want them to engage in writing tasks more quickly and with more fluency?

The traditional five-step writing process never explicitly teaches students to be fluent in their writing—to be able to write quickly on any topic. Extreme Writing targets precisely that with focused, daily writing sessions that provide students with consistent, long-term engagement. It is designed to appeal to students in grades 4–8, and—best of all—the approach involves little extra work for you.

In The Power of Extreme Writing, author Diana Cruchley not only outlines the process but also describes what it looks like in the classroom, explains how to assess student work, and highlights more than a dozen unique inspirations that motivate students to write.

Extreme Writing: it's fun, it's fast, and it works.

What is Extreme Writing?

Why do we need an all-new look at journaling and writing? I became aware of how much schools were neglecting the element of fluency, and I wanted to create consistent, long-term excitement about writing that would help students build that fluency. Extreme Writing is an intermittent, 20-minutes a day, 10-days in a row act of writing that students actually look forward to and want more of. It’s fun, it’s fast, and it works. How many times do your students actually ask for more writing? Extreme Writing is the first step in the right direction to making that happen.

Why is Extreme Writing important?

With regard to the anchor ELA standards and their emphasis on writing proficiency, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) document states, "To meet these goals, students must devote significant time and effort to writing, producing numerous pieces over short and extended time frames throughout the year" (CCSSI, 2010). However, many teachers have difficulty getting their students to write anything at all, especially if students know their efforts will be graded. They may procrastinate, write skimpy drafts, write the minimum required, or even not write at all. Extreme Writing gives you a way to cultivate a writing culture that requires minimal classroom time and builds both fluency and enthusiasm for a skill that is critical to academic success.

You can only improve at something if you practice it often. Many athletes remark that they receive accolades for their great reflexes, top speed, and good understanding of game flow. What they don’t mention is all of the practice, practice, practice that’s required to be great. The research behind Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers (2011) also stresses that intelligence and ambition are not enough—10,000 hours of work and practice are what produce results in the form of mastery. Unfortunately, we can’t grant our students those 10,000 hours of exposure in the classroom, but we can come close and mimic the results with Extreme Writing.

The three skills students must have to be successful writers are code, comprehensibility, and fluency.

• Code refers to an understanding of the code of English, including elements such as reading left to right and top to bottom, along with spaces between words, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and paragraph formation. All of these together convey the specific code used to represent English.
• Comprehensibility is the ability to write comprehensibly, which includes being able to write with clarity (so a reader can understand) and in the conventional forms of English (e.g., comparison, argument, description, essay, recipe, newspaper report, review)
• Fluency is the ability to perform the act of writing quickly. This is the neglected aspect of writing that Extreme Writing can help address.

When students arrive in high school, they may be facing eight subjects, each with its own homework assignments and daunting list of vocabulary to master. For example, in a high school biology text, there can be dozens of potentially unfamilar words, such as organelles, plantae, autotropic, eukaryotic, chloroplast, and mitochondria. It has been said that high school is a giant vocabulary lesson consisting of the words for multiple disciplines. Classroom and homework assignments must be completed quickly for each discipline.

Picture two students; let’s call them Sylvia and Jon. Imagine they are equally clever and equally good at the code of English. Now imagine that they are able to write with equal levels of comprehensibility…but Sylvia has twice the fluency of Jon. This means that Sylvia’s two hours of homework would take Jon four hours, which is a recipe for a lower grade not because Jon is less smart, able, careful, or hard working but simply because he is slower, less fluent, and therefore less productive.

Indeed, choosing a boy (Jon) and a girl (Sylvia) is more than an example. The 2007 National Writing Assesment used a 100-point scale. Girls in 12th grade averaged scores that were 20 points higher than boys. If a typical boy had 60 points, then a typical girl would have 80 (Salahu-Din, 2008).

Why is it called Extreme Writing and how does it work?

When coming up with a name for this process, I tried to choose a name that would express exactly as possible what it is—writing quickly, with few rules (other than neatness, fair spelling, and comprehensibility). It is much more than journaling. And besides, think about it, what sounds like more fun: "Take out your journals" or "Time for Extreme Writing"?

It’s important to note that Extreme Writing does not replace full-scale writing process lessons. Instead, picture it as a side endeavor that focuses on fluency—the neglected third leg of the writing process.

None of the traditional five steps of the writing process (prewriting, drafting, revising, editing/proofreading, and publishing) explicitly teaches students to be fluent—to write quickly on a topic. Fluency is often thought of as an indirect product of all of the work students do in school, but we rarely engage with students to teach the skill directly. Extreme Writing offers a direct effort to produce fluent writers, and the spin-off to the traditional writing process becomes more exciting when students have self-confidence and are able to engage with it more quickly.

With this in mind, Extreme Writing assignments can take any form you (or your students) wish. Although you want students to write comprehensibly—in complete sentences with proper spelling—you should not focus on the details of grammar or structure during these assignments. Make sure students understand from the start that this is not a diary. Everything they write might be shared with the class, so they should not include anything they would not want everyone to know.

Introduce an enticing topic (I refer to them as Inspirations) and provide three prompts or possible topics the Inspiration might inspire. Students then spend about five minutes responding to any prompt they choose in class before taking it home and spending an additional 15 minutes there to finish the assignment. You don’t have to make it a homework completion, but with a very demanding curriculum to cover in class, you may wish to.

How much should I ask my students to write?

I know what you’re thinking. "If I ask my students to write for just five minutes in class and then 15 minutes at home, what’s to stop them from writing three sentences and claiming that it took them the entire 15 minutes?" Well, to be honest, nothing. So how do you stop that? Ask for a specific number of words that they should be able to write in 20 minutes. This word count should be differentiated based on your assessment of individual students.

To that end, I suggest using the Rapid Write approach. In a Rapid Write, students begin with a blank page and the following instructions (or a variation thereof): "When I say go, you are going to have one minute to write anything you want. Start with what is on your mind at the time. You don’t have to stay on a single topic, and it doesn’t have to be organized, but it does have to be neat, spelled as well as possible, and readable by another student. Here’s the catch, though: you are not allowed to lift your pen or pencil to think. You have to keep writing. If you can’t think of anything, it’s okay to write ‘I can’t think of anything. My mind is blank. Maybe everyone else has a blank mind too and they are just writing. I can hear everyone else writing, but I have nothing to say.’ Just keep going until you have something to write about or until the minute is up. Everybody ready, set, go!"

When time is up, ask students to count how many words they wrote and then write that number in brackets at the end of the text. Then have students start again for another minute on another piece of paper and try to "beat" their score. After a while, students will even "assume the racing position" by leaning forward with pens poised, waiting for you to say go. When this happens, you know they’re engaged.

Students may also eventually ask to "do that Rapid Write thing again." This might be the first time they ask for Extreme Writing, but it won’t be the last.

Collect students’ pages and arrange them from lowest to highest word count. What is the student "in the middle" able to accomplish? (You should find that most students’ word counts cluster around the median, or that middle student.) Once you have tallied the "scores" (i.e., the word counts), you may reveal to students what the middle value was—not the bottom and never the top. Current research on gaming theory says that a "leader board" is only motivating for those within striking distance of the leader.

If you take that middle number and multiply it by 20, you will get a good approximation of the maximum number of words students can write in 20 minutes. At this point, you might be saying, "But I told them not to think. And in Extreme Writing I want them to think." That’s true. Imagine you have established that your students can write 300 words in 20 minutes. Subtract 50 for "think time" and maybe another 25 to give a little leeway (e.g., in case their hand gets sore). Then think of individual students’ abilities. Because your least motivated students must remain in the game, you might subtract another 25 words to "level the playing field." In the end, you’re left with a total of 200 words students must write in 20 minutes. Every student (except identified special needs students) gets the same goal number. For some, this is a challenge; for others, it’s really easy. Just stay focused on the goal—it’s about increasing fluency. This is where professional judgment plays a major role.

As students get faster and more fluent, they will increase their word count ability and be able to finish those 200 words in 15 or maybe even 10 minutes. Around the middle of the school year, conduct another Rapid Write and reassess the word count you can ask for and expect from your students. Use the same method of calculation, and you should find that the median (i.e., that middle student) is significantly higher. This is a great way to assess whether your fluency project is working.

Once you have recalculated a word count target (perhaps after the winter break), you could tell your students, "I am so proud of you. You’re getting to be amazingly fast at writing your ideas and thoughts down. Being fluent writers is very good news for all of us. You can now write 200 words in a lot less than 20 minutes. Our class goal remains the same: amazing fluency in 20 minutes. Therefore, I’m going to raise your number to 250."

Your students might complain, but, secretly, they will be proud of themselves. I have actually overheard students in the hallway say, "We can write so fast that our teacher had to assign us to write more!”

What Does Extreme Writing Look Like In the Classroom?

I don’t intend Extreme Writing to be used every day, all year long. That would be boring, and our goal here is to be the opposite of boring. Instead, you do it every day for exactly two weeks—10 school days. Then you wait until the next month and do it for another 10 consecutive days. Repeat every month, and you end up with 8–10 sessions of Extreme Writing in a year.

Part of what makes Extreme Writing work is that it’s incorporated into the curriculum in a way that keeps the process fresh, novel, and almost unexpected. Nevertheless, it should still be somewhat predictable in the amount of work required.

Let’s think again of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (2011) and his concept that developing genius at anything takes 10,000 hours. If students write 20 minutes a day for 10 days in a row, at least eight times a year from 4th through 9th grade, then they will write an additional 9,600 minutes (i.e., 160 hours). It may not be 10,000 hours, but it is a vast improvement over basic writing process lessons and cross-curriculum writing mandated by the Common Core State Standards.

How do I plan my year?

Print a calendar of your school year. Block out the two-week segments you plan to use Extreme Writing. Select the types of Inspirations you will use (possibly from the list of 13 I’ve included in this book). Remember, though, that if you plan to use Extreme Writing throughout the year, you will need 100 Inspirations. It’s important to have as much variety as possible, thereby keeping Extreme Writing as unpredictable as possible. Stay alert to student suggestions and interests as you go; remember that your secret goal is for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• What is Extreme Writing?
• Encore Divider
• Encore
• References
• Related Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright