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Writing Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Compared with speech, effective writing requires a number of things: a high degree of organization in the development of ideas and information; a high degree of accuracy so that there is no ambiguity of meaning; the use of complex grammatical devices for focus and emphasis; and a careful choice of vocabu- lary, grammatical patterns, and sentence structures to create a style which is appropriate to the subject matter and the eventual readers.
Not even the native speaker would necessarily have the wide language base from which to make the relevant choices. When the writer involved is someone whose home language is not English the problems are intensified. The author attempts in her book to offer suggestions to teachers "for helping such students to overcome the difficulties they experience in develop- ing clear effective writing in English" p.
In order to do so she has firmly opted for a process approach to writing, which is based on what good writers do when they write.
She begins by emphasising the importance of aiming at complete contextualized texts - so essential for a sense of purpose, a sense of audience and a sense of direction.
The organization of the book reflects a sensitive understanding of the needs of likely users. The author begins the book by providing a "framework" for writing tasks and in doing so skilfully and succinctly summarizes current insights into the writing process. She goes on to explain the way in which the book explores the various stages of the writing process. In the first section composing Ms Hedge allows teachers to see writing in the classroom from a completely different perspective.
This is a very effective means of preparing the readerfor the author's next point - a knowledge of the strategies used by the pupils can give the teacher valuable insights into the problems faced by unsuccessful writers, as well as a fuller understanding of the nature of the writing process in general.
At this point she briefly describes the three major activities or groups of activities : pre-writing, writing and editing. Six implications for the classroom practice are firmly spelt out, which broadly summarized mean that "the classroom needs to provide an environment in which students can experience being writers, thinking about purpose and audience, drafting a piece of writing, revising it, and sharing it with others" p. The rest of the section on composing is concerned with providing eighteen ideas and techniques for the prewriting stages.
Full information is provided in recipe format level, topic, preparation, and in class with very clear illustrative material so that the most inexperienced teacher is catered for. Section 2 communicating focuses on audience.
A variety of practical tasks is provided to help learners develop their skills in selecting what to say and in selecting the appropriate style. It seems that the ego-centric writing which is so characteristic of the writing of less skilled writers arises from a focus on the topic rather than the intended reader. Section 3 Crafting looks at the more mechanical aspects of writing such as the skill of organizing sentences into paragraphs, using cohesive devices, effective punctuation, and choosing appropriate vocabulary.
Section 4 improving is concerned to ensure that learners revise their work and thus develop their writing skills: teacher feedback becomes part of the important processes of redrafting and editing.
The latter is particularly valuable in ensuring that the needs of the actual learners concerned have been taken into account This book will certainly be welcomed by the many teachers who are looking for an approach to writing which could form part of an integrated communicative curriculum. Her ideas on the process of marking are particularly valuable in this regard.
She has gathered an amazing number of ideas and techniques which could readily be adapted to meet the needs of South African learners or any others. The identification of audience is not as explicit as it might be in the section of communicating. In addition, there seems to be confusion between audience in the sense of someone who reads what you have written for the purpose of helping you redraft and edit it and a genuine audience for whom the piece is designed.
For instance, the project 2. It seems that an opportunity of identifying people who would find the information useful and valuable and creating material for them has been lost.
I was disappointed too in the treatment of grammar. There is not even much advice or directed comment on the ways in which learners might achieve such accuracy. I would also have liked to have seen a clear acknowledgement of the close tie between reading and writing. Although reading activities are often used, they are placed as introductory activities. It is, of course, a moot point whether a competent user of language can engage in either reading or writing without the other.
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