Everything I Know About Writing, I Learned from the Science of Reading**
**At least, everything I’ve learned in the last 2 ½ years
[Learn more about why I decided to homeschool and the Science of Reading in Weird! Why Homeschool if You’re Not Religious on Substack.]
Ingrid Bergman Portrait Still 1940
Were you duped into believing people naturally learned to read and write? That these skills were reserved for the gifted?
I was.
As an 80s kid, I’ll never forget that flashback scene on Growing Pains where a tiny Carol Seaver picks up a book and effortlessly rattles off several sentences as her astonished family looks on. Some people just have a talent for words, right?
Not exactly. Unlike the organic concept of learning to speak, reading—and by default writing—is not a skill that naturally develops in kids, no matter what myths play out on television.
Reading must be explicitly taught.
I’d have to come to terms with my child’s reading progress playing out more like a scene from the Incredible Hulk going through his transformation than that sitcom clip of Carol Seaver effortlessly advancing her literacy.
I’ve told you when COVID hit, my daughter’s school closed permanently. After six months with a stir-crazy now 3-year-old at home, unable to write or edit my work, I decided I’d roll up my teacher's sleeves and implement some curriculum into our daily lives.
It was a massive undertaking.
I have a teaching degree in secondary English education but before that role, I taught preschool. My students fell outside the age range for early literacy. My high school freshmen and juniors studied Shakespeare. And long before them, my preschoolers were focused strictly on naming their ABCs.
I had never taught kids how to string sounds together or used best practices to mint new readers. But I wanted to get a jumpstart on reading with my daughter. Her father and I were both writers, so it should come naturally to her, right?
Oh boy, was I about to get schooled!
After some trial and error with different curricula and professional development classes, I stumbled upon the Science of Reading.
Land o’ lakes! If you’re looking for a new soap opera, dive down this rabbit hole into the Science of Reading. Lucy Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell are curriculum developers who are fanning the flames of this hot topic where educators argue over the merits of the Science of Reading vs. Balanced Literacy. If you’re looking for more info (or you’re all caught up on Days of Our Lives) plug in the keywords above and I guarantee, you’ll have more smackdowns and hair-pulling than you’ve ever seen in a daytime drama.
Implementing these science-based best practices with my daughter was a struggle at first. I had no idea what I was doing. I started by introducing a letter a day. Then I quickly moved on to a workbook that threw my child into the deep end of reading and writing before she even had a good grip on her Ticonderoga pencil.
Oh! The power struggles—with me and that pencil.
I soon realized she was a bit young for this approach, so I backtracked, chucked out the workbook, and mixed her early literacy with some kinesthetic learning.
I let her bounce on a mini trampoline while she physicalized the alphabet. I gave her an extra-large pencil with a grip to help her better write her name. And we went through several rounds of reviewing the sounds of the alphabet without forcing any reading.
This year we started a daily practice of Heggerty, a program that introduces kids to phonemic and phonological awareness. These short videos include rhyming, breaking down phonemes, and blending sounds together to form words.
After experimenting with different strategies—and throwing a few out—the process of reading is starting to stick. My child now walks around the house spelling out CVC (consonant—vowel—consonant) words.
That’s the takeaway for writers (and why I’ve subjected you to my early homeschooling hell). All these attempts at the process of learning to read add up to something bigger than the sum of their parts. Just as practicing how to shape better sentences teach a writer how to develop their writing craft into storytelling.
It can be done.
But it won’t get done smoothly or in a straight line.
For instance, I thought I might have a genius Carol Seaver kind of kid on my hands when my daughter read word-for-word her first reader. Until I had her read the same words in a different order. I had been tricked.
My little sneak was memorizing the words on the page!
Her “reading” was very much like what this mother discovered when she gave her daughter the Purple Challenge.
The Science of Reading may be backed by research, but it also has common sense baked in. If you’ve got a child who is memorizing sentences or using pictures to guess, that child isn’t reading.
Likewise, you might have plenty of words on a page, but you aren’t a writer unless those words are strung together thoughtfully. Sure, there’s some subjective terrain here, but let’s get real—we’ve all read the nonsense that gets praise for being bold but says nothing.
In one of my old online business groups, there was a woman who’d made a name for herself as a copywriter because she was constantly chiming in and self-promoting. More power to her. Unfortunately, much of her copy left readers scratching their heads in confusion.
So much of writing today falls into that category. We live in a social media society. We post quick short statements—open-ended, dangling phrases that don’t always have clear messages.
If writing doesn’t communicate an idea to your reader, your writer’s purpose is lost.
For example, there’s a school in my neighborhood with a big, bold sign hanging on their fence:
“Right to Teach. Right to Learn.”
Huh? What does that mean?
Was there some injustice preventing that school’s teachers from teaching and their students from learning?
Nope. Then what was the message here?
Why would a school print up a sign that says what we all acknowledge is the role of education? Of course, teachers have the right to teach, and students have the right to learn. There was no evidence this system was being impeded in any way.
Unfortunately, their website copy is just as vague. It doesn’t explain the sign any more than the sign itself does. So, what’s the call to action for the community?
I tried to read between the lines.
Perhaps this phrase was a reference to the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and the guarantee of education as a human right. Fair enough. But that’s not what the sign said. Nothing I read stated, “Education is a basic human right for every person and that’s what we promote here.”
Where does that leave the readers?
Pretty confused. But with an opportunity to do better as writers.
Online, you’ll see plenty of zippy quips that lack substance. They’ve also become part of real-world advertising campaigns.
Writers should give themselves homework by analyzing these trendy but lackluster phrases. When you stumble upon cute, but confusing copy. Ask yourself:
Do these statements make sense?
Do they say anything at all?
Who’s this statement addressing?
What’s in this for the audience?
Poetic language is great but not at the expense of real meaning.
Writing sentences that don’t convey a message can trip up our readers. I blame these baffling buzzwords on our need to constantly add to a noisy conversation. Social media advocates that we keep talking even if we aren’t contributing anything worthwhile.
You’ll also see these perplexing messages on sites that are attempting to attract novice writers for classes and/or critique services. They often quote a famous author in a way that’s intended to be inspiring but produces a vague message.
Like this quotation attributed to Margaret Atwood, “A word after a word after a word is power.”
It is?
All I’ve got is a string of non-connected words so I must be Superwoman, right? Nooooo?!
My guess is this quotation was plucked from a much longer one and this stand-alone statement is missing some vital information.
Even a favorite author of mine Annie Proulx becomes a victim of this selective quotation technique: “Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
I don’t think this one quotation provides us with enough information to substantiate her full meaning.
If we do use just this quotation alone, it doesn’t stand up to rigorous scientific testing.
We know from the data on the Science of Reading that just being read to won’t produce readers, so it’s not much of a stretch to know that just reading won’t make you a writer, either. And my guess is the prolific Proulx knows this, too.
That’s like saying, if you listen to a lot of Beethoven, you’ll soon be an expert pianist.
Good luck with that experiment!
These simplified quotations torn from their original articles or a book jacket aren’t meant to give the writer real tools. They’re ads meant to charm wannabe writers into thinking they have a chance at mass marketing a bestseller.
It reminds me of those True Blood vampires who glamoured their victims into seeing things more perfectly.
It’s cruel. But hey that’s marketing, I guess.
Could we apply some scientific rigor to these pithy sayings?
Here’s one:
“When the shoe dropped in her lap, the foot was still in it.”
I can’t recall where I read this gem. But writers who choose to be clever often fail to provide their readers with significance.
My guess is the writer intended to turn the old idiom “waiting for the other shoe to drop” into a clever play on words. One that would leave me wanting to know to whom this foot was attached. Unfortunately, I could care less about the turn of phrase because I can’t wrap my mind around why a shoe would be dropped into someone’s lap in the first place.
Have you ever been sitting around, maybe in your living room, when a shoe dropped in your lap? (If you have kids, don’t answer that.)
Here’s the thing—in the idiom, the shoe drops. It doesn’t drop into someone's lap.
I applaud the writer’s creativity, but to make this make sense, the author would need to anchor our understanding to the original idiom. Something like:
“She was waiting for the other shoe to drop. But she never expected this shoe would be attached to a foot.”
My goal here isn’t to beat up on every imperfection in writing. Far from it. I want writers to reflect on real meaning. Their audience depends on it. Make sure the content you’re putting out into the world connects with your readers. And learn how to put it into a useful container that doesn’t hinder its meaning.
Your goal is effortless communication from writer to reader.
There’s an amazing graphic in the Science of Reading called the Reading Rope. It presents a clear picture of all the different skills needed to become a fluent reader.
Since there is no Science of Writing or Writing Rope** it makes it more difficult for us to establish a toolbox to become skilled writers.
(** The Writing Rope by Joan Sedita is a book on explicit writing instruction that was just published in August 2022 after I wrote this original post. I’m also enrolled in professional development classes on this very subject later this year and I’m ecstatic.)
Our best bet is to immerse ourselves in the totality of writing.
If you’ve spent 12+ years in school and any time in college classes, you’ve been given exposure to writing techniques. But your quest doesn’t end there.
If you want to write and write well, you must continue to study your craft.
That doesn’t mean you must be perfect at all aspects of literacy. I’ve never felt like I was a great speller**, even after years of teaching English. Content is king, yes, but the vehicle that gets that content to our audience is important, too. I had to acknowledge my literacy gaps and aim to regain that learning.
In addition, to spell check or Grammarly, there are a few resources I’d recommend you read cover to cover. Then keep these books on hand to refer to as necessary:
Some of the material you’ll find within these pages will be a review from high school or college classes. Some of it will be new. But by taking the time to add these books to your home library, you’ll give yourself more communication power as an author.
We all must go back to school.
Commit to continued learning, not just big concepts. To figure out how to translate our ideas into memorable messages using the sometimes-tedious skills of sentence construction. This process may seem outdated, but a solid foundation will propel your work forward.
I’m not saying slang or informal language isn’t acceptable. It absolutely is and is all over this website. But your words must have a message for your audience.
My goal is for us all to notice our blind spots—the ones that contribute to stumbling blocks in our writing.
**After I wrote this article it suddenly dawned on me why I see myself as such a bad speller. Not terrible, but certainly not the spelling bee champion my husband was in grade school.
After going alllllll the way back to the beginning of my reading education, I’ve finally identified that growing up in the Deep South has been a significant contributor to my inferior spelling. I struggle to hear the sounds in words, especially when my formative years were spent surrounded by teachers and other adults with thick accents.
Pin and pen have always sounded the same to me. And my husband says the word oil has about five syllables when I pronounce it.
Interestingly, I was just taking a class in reading from The Reading League where the instructor Kelli Johnson stated, “that it’s easier to teach a blind person to read than a hearing-impaired person.” And I get that now. So much of our understanding of reading stems from auditory cues. So, when regional dialects are superimposed, and explicit instruction isn’t taught there are gaps in learning.
But now that I spend every day with my daughter using phonemic awareness, I’m more clearly distinguishing separate sounds. It’s never too late to add a new skill.
What gaps in your learning impede your writing? Do you feel like a bad speller as I do? Do you struggle with grammar? Do you read and re-read sentences to get a full sense of their comprehension?
There are ample—free or inexpensive—classes available to adult learners and those parenting children that can help fill in gaps, better understand the process of reading, and give confidence to the power of writing.
Here are a few places to find professional development classes:
The Reading League Parent Course Introduction to Basic Reading Instruction
Reading Rockets Reading 101: A Guide to Teaching Reading and Writing
Reading Buddies (a great new show for early literacy. My daughter loves it!)
* Upcoming Class: The Writing Rope: A Framework for Explicit Writing Instruction in All Subjects
[Learn more about why I decided to homeschool and the Science of Reading in Weird! Why Homeschool if You’re Not Religious on Substack.]
