These word sets create different sentence patterns, such as sentences about processes, sentences that list reasons or traits, sentences that urge or persuade, sentences that describe, and sentences that compare and contrast. Understanding the logic of these sentence-level patterns is critical for students when they attempt to combine sentences into paragraphs. “If you want to construct a persuasive paragraph, you need to understand how to form a because sentence that expresses cause and effect; and if you’re going to write a compare-andcontrast paragraph, you need to be able to create sentences with although and while because they express that comparative logic.”
Before students are asked to write paragraphs, they should master these logical relationships at the sentence level. “If they’re still laboring at the sentence level, they’re not going to have the cognitive resources available to work at the paragraph level. Paragraphs are really just words and sentences put together in a kind of logical order, and each paragraph type has a kind of sentence type at its core. If students are breaking down at the paragraph level, then we need to make sure they can produce the necessary core sentences. One of our big problems currently is that most people want to hop right to the paragraph level. They say, ‘Our state-mandated tests require children to write a personal sequence narrative or a three- or a five-paragraph expository text structure.’ So they give kids a paragraph template, but they skip all the important sentence work that leads up to it.”
Students with dyslexia who struggle with the logic of sentence construction should begin their instruction in this top-down approach with oral rather than written practice. First, they should practice identifying the different logical patterns in sentences (e.g., persuading, listing, describing, comparing and contrasting) as they listen to them. Using sentences that relate to areas of student interest or strength can improve focus and endurance. Next, students should be asked to practice speaking sentences of these different types (e.g., “Describe this . . .” or “Tell me why I should . . .” or “Tell me three things you want for your birthday . . .”). Next, students should practice identifying these sentence patterns when they read them.
Only after students have mastered all these preliminary practice steps should they be asked to actually write the different sentence types. Again, the point of this practice is not to learn which words are nouns or verbs but which kinds of words perform various logical functions. We list specific resources for practicing these skills in Appendix A.
Writing Paragraphs, Essays, and Reports
Getting Started at the Paragraph Level. Once students have learned to identify and create different sentence types, they must then learn to construct each of the different types of paragraphs. Mastering the formation of the various paragraph types mostly involves learning to connect sentences of each core type with appropriate introductory and concluding sentences. When students have mastered these steps, they’ll have acquired many of the key skills they need to write a full essay or report.
While teaching paragraph and essay construction, it’s important to use clear templates. These templates should include both explicit descriptions of individual steps and engaging examples of finished work. The same listen— speak—read—write progression described above should also be used for paragraph construction.
Again, most students with dyslexia are top-down learners who work best when they know precisely what they’re aiming at. In this sense, many students with dyslexia should be thought of as “apprentice” learners who learn best by imitating skilled work: that is, they master their craft more quickly and efficiently when the steps for skilled performance are explicitly stated and demonstrated than when they have to puzzle out the rules for performance themselves.
With paragraph construction, a good example of the paragraph type they’re trying to construct should be kept available for reference while they’re working. One useful source of templates and instructions is Diana Hanbury King’s Writing Skills series,3 which provides excellent descriptions of the various paragraph types as well as a program of graded instruction that will help dyslexic students develop all the important writing skills. Another useful program is Step Up to Writing (www.stepuptowriting.com), which teaches students explicit rules about the types of information they should include at different points in a paragraph or essay. Step Up to Writing also provides lists of common transition words that dyslexic students can draw upon to link their sentences into paragraphs and essays.
During the writing process, students with dyslexia will often struggle to initiate a new sentence or paragraph, expand their ideas, or find the right words to express their thoughts. When this happens, they should be assisted using a combination of brainstorming, preparation, and prompting techniques. In using these techniques, the student’s interests and cognitive strengths should be employed, just as with reading.
Problems initiating writing assignments are often greatest with open-ended questions or assignments. A student’s creativity can often be released by negative or contrary prompts—that is, by giving the student a statement or thesis with which he or she is likely to disagree. Humorous or silly prompts often also work well to get the student’s ideas flowing. Knowing and focusing on a student’s interests and strengths can be helpful in this process.
Students who are particularly strong nonverbal thinkers or visual imagers often benefit from brainstorming that uses sketches, doodles, diagrams, or graphic organization techniques. These can be done on paper, a whiteboard, or a computer. Instruction and practice in formal “mind-mapping” techniques can help individuals use strategies of this type in a more organized and productive fashion. One of the top mind-mapping software programs, Inspiration, was created by Mona Westhaver, who is herself dyslexic and designed this program to meet her own needs: “Visual learning strategies . . . allowed me to capture all my ideas in random order, meaning I was able to exercise my multivariate need to jump around and let lots of information simultaneously flow through my mind and on to the paper. Then, with all of my ideas visually in front of me, I could organize my thoughts.”4 Many individuals with dyslexia experience similar benefits from programs like Inspiration or Kidspiration, which is a graphic organization program designed for younger students. Mind-mapping techniques are also taught in books like Mapping Inner Space by Nancy Margulies.5
Highly interconnected and insight-based problem-solvers often benefit most when brainstorming is unstructured, relatively free of time pressure, and conducted in a relaxing environment. Very open-ended prompts like “What does this make you think of?” or “What pops into your head when I say . . . ?” often work well. Having a digital recorder or scribe to record ideas without any need for the student to write them down may also help students keep track of their ideas without derailing the creative process. Highly narrative thinkers often benefit from beginning the brainstorming process by searching for cases, examples, fables, legends, myths, or stories that particular questions or topics make them think of. Students should be allowed wide latitude to think freely during this stage of the process.
Other methods for freeing up the creativity of the student before beginning the writing project include:• Reviewing words that might be used to convey the logic of the sentence or paragraph types chosen. For example, for a compare-and-contrast sentence, words like while, although, but, and however should be reviewed. Having a list of these words printed up and visible during the writing process can be a great help. The books by Diana Hanbury King and by Jennings and Haynes in the “Resources for Writing” section of Appendix A provide sources for these lists.
• Having a core set of “go-to” words of different types available during writing—like prepositions, adjectives, and adverbs—and reviewing these lists before beginning to write.
• Picking a particular place or scene or event that the child is familiar with (i.e., one that remains strong in episodic memory) or a subject the child is especially interested in, then using that as the “setting” about which the child will wr
ite. (It can also be helpful to review some of the nouns and verbs that are associated with that scene.)
• Brainstorming and reviewing word lists that convey or relate to a particular type of mood, tone, location, topic, etc.
When the student bogs down during the writing process, use prompts like those mentioned above. If the student is struggling to find particular words, Dr. Haynes recommends a “graduated series” of extrinsic and intrinsic cues like the following:• Extrinsic cues are hints that a teacher or tutor gives when the student is experiencing word-finding difficulties. A graduated cueing system means that the teacher only gives the student enough cueing to retrieve the word, but doesn’t give the word away. A graduated series of cues could include:—First a picture
—Then gesture or a “mimed” hint
—Then a definition
—Finally, the first sound or letter
• Intrinsic cues are self-initiated ones, and because of this they are potentially even more valuable in the long run. They include strategies like imagining a verb’s action or a noun’s appearance, function, location or setting, circumstances, or time of appearance.
In general, writing tasks for dyslexic students should also be “chunked” into small, distinct steps or stages. Each step should be clearly explained and demonstrated to them, then tackled one at a time.
Including—and Leaving Out—the Right Details. Many individuals with dyslexia have difficulty learning how much and what kind of detail to include in their writing. Individuals with strong I-, N-, or D-strengths may include excessive or irrelevant details because they often see so many connections and levels of meaning between ideas. For students who have difficulty narrowing down their ideas, it often helps to decide in advance what the focus of their writing will be. One useful strategy for limiting focus is to use the “5W/H” approach, where the student decides which of the potential questions (i.e., who, what, when, where, why, or how) to answer and which to ignore.
At the other end of the “detail spectrum,” dyslexic individuals with either especially strong verbal imagery and/or particular weaknesses in word retrieval or verbal output often include too few details. This can be either because they “see” so much detail in their heads that they forget how little they’ve communicated to their audience or because it takes so much effort for them to put their thoughts into words that they experience working memory overload before they can get everything down on paper. Students with problems of this kind often benefit from reading their work aloud or being asked to form a mental picture of their subject using only the words on the page.
Reading written work aloud also has other benefits. Law professor and dyslexic David Schoenbrod—who has written four highly regarded books on environmental law and legislation—shared a story that illustrates these benefits: “I had a lot of trouble learning to write. In high school I was assigned to write one thousand words every weekend, and I had a lot of trouble getting finished. My father was an excellent writer, and he was left shaking his head. I labored at writing until a law school professor had us students write short articles about the law in the manner of, say, The New Yorker, and then read them aloud to the seminar. That way, we heard our clunkers and might eventually acquire the skill of ‘hearing’ them even when reading silently to ourselves. This made writing an extension of talking rather than reading. What a relief.”
One potential limitation to this “self-proofing” method is that the dyslexic writer’s brain often initially “sees” what it thinks it’s written rather than what’s really on the page. Using a pen or a finger to “tick off” each word read as it is read, or getting the assistance of someone else who can read the work aloud, can eliminate this problem. So can the “read-aloud” (text-to-speech) technologies we discussed in the last chapter.
We sometimes encounter one other rather surprising source of diminished detail in some students with dyslexia. That source is a misunderstanding about the point of school essays. Several dyslexic students have told us they write short essays because they don’t like to tell teachers things that the teacher already knows. So they avoid restating facts they learned in school and include only information the class hasn’t discussed. These students need to understand that the point of school essay writing isn’t to teach the teacher but to write as if trying to teach another student who knows nothing about the topic.
Before moving on we want to stress once more that there’s absolutely no reason to push students with dyslexia to write at the paragraph and essay level too quickly. If a student with dyslexia is still mastering sentence-level or single-paragraph writing in middle school, that’s okay. Keep working at that level before trying longer papers. Many teachers and parents worry that students will “miss the boat” if they don’t develop essay-level writing skills early on. However, the danger is much greater that dyslexic students will give up on writing altogether before they have a chance to “grow into” their talents. Many of the individuals we interviewed for this book were considered poor writers by their teachers in college—including hugely successful novelists Anne Rice and Vince Flynn—yet they now make their living preparing highly polished prose.
The Point of Writing: Using Technology to Put Thoughts on Paper
Just as with reading, educators often disagree about the use of technological accommodations for students who are struggling to write. Some believe that all schoolwork must be handwritten. Others allow keyboarding for certain students but deny other accommodations like oral dictation or oral testing. In addressing these hotly contested issues, our choices may be clarified if we consider the point of writing.
Writing allows us to share our thoughts with others in a form that’s easy to store and transmit. Writing sharpens our thinking by allowing us to elaborate, explain, and develop our ideas to a greater degree than most of us can do orally. Writing also imposes a greater demand for precision and clarity because it prevents us from “slurring over” our structural and conceptual difficulties as we do when speaking by using facial expressions, gestures, or postures to complete the meaning of our sentence fragments.
These considerations point to several important benefits of writing. The most important of these benefits are the chances writing provides to develop and refine ideas, and its demands for precision and clarity.
Writing by hand is clearly not essential for receiving any of these benefits. So long as your words can be accurately stored and shared, the physical process by which you store those words should be relatively unimportant.6 In fact, for many students with dyslexia, handwriting is more an impediment than an aid to written communication. When writers haven’t yet mastered the automatic formation of letters, spelling, or other skills, handwriting takes up valuable working memory resources that could be better used for more important aspects of writing, like forming thoughts or using proper grammar and syntax. Insisting that students who struggle with handwriting should do all their work by hand is simply unreasonable, unproductive, and when carried to extremes, deeply unkind.
This doesn’t mean that students who struggle with handwriting shouldn’t practice to improve their handwriting. On the contrary, dyslexic students who struggle with handwriting should practice every day using the techniques we’ve described, so their handwriting will eventually become more automatic. But students whose handwriting is not yet automatic should learn handwriting and written communication as two separate subjects. Handwriting practice involves forming letters, writing words, and using written conventions. Writing volves forming letters, writing words, and using written conventions. Writing practice involves constructing sentences, paragraphs, and discourses (essay, story), and for students with severe handwriting difficulties this is usually best done using keyboarding (if possible) or dictation.
Keyboarding has many benefits for dyslexic students besides making their writing easier to read, so it can actually be valuable for all individuals with dyslexia—whether or not they have difficulty writing by hand. For students who are even m
odestly proficient with typing, keyboarding requires less working memory than handwriting. As a result, more working memory resources are left available for other aspects of writing. Cut-and-paste functions also make editing and rewriting easier, which is important since individuals with dyslexia almost always need to proof and polish their work. By lowering the effort needed to revise, word processing makes it dramatically easier for individuals with dyslexia to produce documents they can be proud of and that will earn higher marks from their instructors.
Word processing programs with an interactive spell-check function—especially programs that are geared for dyslexic students—are also very helpful. As Blake Charlton recalled of his middle school years, “I was given a calculator and spell-check for everything, and almost overnight I went from just barely passing my exams to being very far up on the curve.”
Not only do these programs help dyslexic students reduce spelling errors, but when used consistently they actually teach individuals with dyslexia to spell better. Spell-checkers provide immediate feedback on spelling mistakes—which is most valuable for producing lasting change and learning. They also focus their feedback on words that students actually use. We’ve often seen remarkable improvements in the spelling of dyslexic students who regularly use spell-check—even if they’ve made little progress with more direct and traditional forms of spelling instruction.
The Dyslexic Advantage Page 20