Writing With Open Eyes: Teaching Young Writers to Recognize Bias and Create with Clarity

For anyone who regularly reads news reports or scrolls through social media, one thing is abundantly clear: our media is flooded with messages designed to evoke a response from readers. Too often those feelings may be anger or anxiety or fear, but looking a little more closely will also reveal messages of hope and joy.

How We Got Here: In the classroom, I always focused on developing an understanding of bias as something that readers do. My fourth graders and I reviewed websites designed to be misleading (the Northwest Pacific Tree Octopus, though getting slightly dated now, was always a favorite) and discussed how to be critical consumers of content. I taught kids how to look for words and phrases that revealed the author’s intentions and biases.

But I realize now that I missed an important opportunity to transfer this work to writing. I was so focused on teaching students to be critical information consumers that I forgot about the other side of the coin: becoming purposeful creators.

Why This Matters: As our society becomes increasingly dependent on digital text and AI continues to expand at an explosive rate, even the youngest writers need to learn the weight of words. The language we choose and use in writing conveys not only a literal message but is also a window into our beliefs and biases, even when the writer might not be completely aware of how they feel or the unwritten message behind their words. We have the power to share writing publicly with just the click of a button, so it’s essential for us to have a sense of the weight of our own words as writers (and an awareness of the impact of the words and images AI helps us create).

Where To Begin: Choosing the right words to clearly share a message lives in the phases of drafting and revising, but it has roots in the planning stages. As a teacher, I focused heavily on what I wanted students to write (a personal narrative, an informational paragraph, a literary essay), but a few direct questions can also help writers focus on the why throughout the pre-writing and drafting stages of their piece:

These questions serve a dual purpose: not only will they help writers focus and think deeply about the text they are creating, but they will also build students’ capacity for empathy by pushing them to consider differing viewpoints and the feelings of others. Consider returning to these questions as a reflection framework throughout the writing process.

Going Deeper: The real heart of this work lies in revision when we guide students to carefully consider the words and phrases they have chosen and examine their impact. To center an understanding of bias and the weight of word choices during the revision process, you might try some of the following strategies:

• Compare multiple pieces of writing on the same topic to demonstrate how word choices influence the reader.
  • For younger writers, pull exemplar sentences from a collection of mentor texts that have slightly different perspectives.
    • For narrative work, this can begin with comparisons as simple as a classic version of The Three Little Pigs paired with Jon Scieszka’s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs.
    • For informational or opinion work, consider selecting an animal with a “reputation” (i.e. great white sharks, dinosaurs, orcas) and pulling texts that emphasize their predatory powers compared to their intelligence and role in the ecosystem. (For an exemplar shark text set, check out: Who Would Win: Great White Sharks or Killer Whales? by Jerry Palotta; If Sharks Disappeared by Lily Williams; National Geographic Kids: Sharks! by Stephanie Warren Drimmer.)
  • For older students, use media bias resources such as All Sides to compare differing viewpoints on the same topic, making sure to preview texts and select resources carefully to approach political topics with care.
• Demonstrate revising for voice and tone. Pull out a thesis sentence (or another high-impact excerpt) from demonstration writing and model the following:
  • Questioning the deeper meaning: What am I trying to say to my audience here?
  • Playing with word choices: How does it shift the meaning if I try ___? Think aloud while rewriting the sentence 2-3 different ways, shifting the underlying meaning slightly with each revision.
  • Reflecting on impact: How well does ____ show what I believe? How well does it match what I want my readers to think and believe?
• Leverage partner revision. Identifying bias in a text while reading is a difficult task; seeing the bias in our own writing is even more challenging. Assign students a “critical” reading partner who will share feedback about what they believe the writing is truly about, how it makes them feel, and the clarity of the writer’s arguments and ideas. Make sure to scaffold this work to build students’ skills and independence, using guided questions and sentence stems to support this work.

The Bottom Line: Kids don’t just deserve to know how to read and write, they need to be critical readers and intentional writers. We are bombarded constantly by words, images, and stories that evoke a range of emotions, and teachers have a unique opportunity to impact the next generation of creators by helping them understand the weight of their words. While writing must sometimes take on a serious tone or build a sense of urgency, writers also have the power to inspire hope and positivity. By making some small shifts in our writing practices to raise awareness of the impact and meaning behind a piece of writing, we can set students up to become both critical consumers and creators of information.