"I supported Emily's wrist for her homework and her writing was best we've seen."

That was the happy message in a recent email I received from a parent of an eight year old. The family had come to see me about a range of reading and writing problems that the child had been experiencing since kindergarten. Like so many other families, they were delighted and amazed at how easy it was to achieve smooth handwriting.

Continue reading "Handwriting Skyrockets with a Helping Hand" »

Posted by Marion Blank at 06:34 PM
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Last week, a parent raised one of the queries that I regularly receive about spelling. Specifically, her question was, " I am curious to know if you have any insight about my son's spelling errors. He is in fourth grade and on his spelling test, which he practices for all week, he spells many words phonetically, but incorrectly. Examples are mixing up -ie and -ei; also -le, -el, -al endings as well as the -ant and -ent endings."

Actually, many parents who see their children struggling with basic words like "dawg" and "kat" would be delighted if their children were as far along as this child. After all, his mistakes are limited to relatively subtle details. But still, it's dismaying to see a bright, hard-working child struggling for years with spelling inaccuracies.

Some of the difficulties have been written about extensively.

Continue reading "Spelling: The Tip of the "Visual" Iceberg" »

Posted by Marion Blank at 03:55 PM
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In a new book titled Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell, the sociologist and popular writer, claims that the best way to achieve expertise is to spend 10,000 hours honing your skills. The idea is not new. It has been captured for ages in the old proverb of "practice makes perfect."

Unfortunately, in American education, the move seems to be in the opposite direction. Writing is one of the most important skills that schools can teach. Yet, high schools are going to shorter and shorter assignments, often to the point of requiring no papers at all.

Continue reading "High School Research Papers: A Dying Breed" »

Posted by Marion Blank at 02:50 PM
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The Associated Press this week had an interesting article on the vanishing skill of cursive writing. It started with a report on a parent who was surprised to find that her eighth-grader did not know how to write her signature. The daughter explained that, aside from a few weeks of cursive writing in third grade, the school never made demands for that skill.

Continue reading "Cursive Writing: "Is It Biting the Dust?"" »

Posted by Marion Blank at 06:07 PM
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Reading, and reading problems, get lots of attention. Not so with writing, and writing problems which receive far less time and effort. The consequences of this neglect are serious—as many discover once they leave college and try to move up the career ladder. Skilled writing is an enormous advantage for both academic and job success.

In the desert landscape of writing instruction in schools, one form stands out. It goes by the name of “journal writing.”

Continue reading "Writing: It Can Be Done But It Has to Be Done Differently" »

Posted by Marion Blank at 10:39 PM
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In case you don’t find yourself seated in front of a computer on a regular basis, the sequence ‘qwertyuiop’ may seem a bit odd. Should that be the case, you are probably equally unfamiliar with its neighbors-- ‘asdfghjkl’ and ‘zxcvbnm.’ In combination, these represent the three main rows of letters on a keyboard.

They came to the fore recently when I was reading an article about Philip Roth, the novelist. Talking about Roth’s drive, passion and/or obsession with writing, it said “Never a day passes when he does not stare at those three hateful words: qwertyuiop, asdfghjkl, and zxcvbnm.”

Continue reading "Dealing with Handwriting Problems? Turn to qwertyuiop" »

Posted by Marion Blank at 07:27 PM
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Reading, and reading problems, get lots of attention. But writing, and writing problems, which are equally important receive far less time and effort. The consequences of this neglect are serious—as many discover once they leave college and try to move up the career ladder. Skilled writing is an enormous advantage for both academic and job success. It is also in enormously short supply.

To deal with the problem, schools have placed one technique into center stage. It goes by the name of “journal writing.”

Continue reading "The Right Way to Write?" »

Posted by Marion Blank at 11:56 AM
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For many children, even when reading and writing are going well, there is an aspect of the printed page that eludes them. That aspect is punctuation. (That word may send a few shivers down your own spine since many, many adults report that they do not really understand how to use punctuation with any sense of mastery.)

The difficulties are understandable. Punctuation is designed to capture some powerful dimensions of language such as pauses, questions, emphasis, and hesitations--to name but a few. However, to carry out this rather significant assignment, punctuation--and its partner capitalization--have been given a paltry set of minute marks that hardly seems up to the task.

Do these limitations mean we, and our children, are to be condemned to being "punctuation illiterates?" No, not at all.

Continue reading "Resolving the Mysteries and Miseries of Punctuation" »

Posted by Marion Blank at 07:13 PM
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Four Meny Thee Ansor Iz NO! Butt R Thay Rite?

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to his daughter offered the following advice about spelling: Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word, consider how it is spelled, and, if you do not remember, turn to a dictionary.

Today's world presents us with a dramatically different scene. The bad news is that vast numbers of schools see accurate spelling not only as unnecessary, but actually undesirable. The good news is that you can adopt techniques that can get children over the hurdles that this change has imposed.

Continue reading "Duz Ackurit SPELLING Matir?" »

Posted by Marion Blank at 05:14 PM
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