WIP?

The past few months I’ve been reading several authors’ blogs and I keep coming across the abbreviation W.I.P. Finally I figured out it means Work In Progress. WIP is part of the language of writers, therefore I introduced the term to fourth graders today with this chart:

W.I.P. Decisions

Topic — What will I write about?

Genre — What will I make?

Audience — Who will read my writing?

Purpose — Why am I writing it?

As I consider giving students more choice over their own WIPs, I think this list is important. Over the course of the year, students should have choice in each of these four areas and we should be intentional about leaving some of these four areas available for student choice in every writing project. For their first writing project of the school year, I’ve limited the audience — they are preparing a writing project to share in a class celebration. However, they must decide about the other areas.

Being a writer means making these decisions. If we, as teachers, always make the choices when it comes to topic, genre, audience, and purpose it is a disservice to the young writers in our classrooms.

Yesterday a book I ordered arrived in my mailbox, Hooked: Write fiction that grabs readers at page one and never lets them go by Les Edgerton. I couldn’t wait to crack it open. This quote influenced my lesson today:

One quick sidenote. I will never refer to a story in this book as a piece. As in, “When you begin to work on your piece . . .” I suspect that’s a significant part of our problem as writers in getting our work published. Our terminology sometimes reflects our mind-set about our work. We’re so used to receiving writing instruction in precisely that way — in pieces — that we even refer to the thing we’re working on as such. Writing education, by and large, consists of far too many exercises, in my experience. The teacher gives us a unit on description, then one on something called characterization, then on and on . . . You get the picture. We learn pieces. This approach, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, but what is perhaps terrible is that many times the teacher neglects to show her students the big picture. The story itself. How it’s shaped. It’s not just throwing a bunch of pieces together. It’s much more complicated than that.

I have my own theory about why writing is taught largely through exercises: It’s easy.

It’s easy to tell the class, “Okay now, boys and girls, today we’re going to work on descriptions. For the rest of the hour, I want you to come up with an original description of the beach. You know, like crashing waves, burnished sand dunes, wind with a salt tang in it. Original stuff like that.” (I’m being sarcastic with that last sentence, in case you missed it.) Then, with the class happily engaged — well, busy, anyway — the teacher can do all her important work . . .

(bold emphasis mine)

And one more thing, I want to mention I’ve been working with the curriculum maps the state of Indiana has released which are aligned with Common Core Standards. I’ve been studying these maps to find ways to make them work within the spirit of writing workshop. I’m pleased to say this lesson is in direct response to the learning targets for quarter one writing instruction in Indiana. It is my hope we can hold tight to the philosophy of writing workshop while working with the Common Core Standards.