Introduction
When I started teaching 14 years ago and thought about what write to learn meant, I must admit that I treated writing like a final exam. We’d read a novel and discuss it for a few weeks; then, I’d assign a literary analysis essay with the intention of having students write to show their understanding of ideas explored in the novel as well as how literary devices or rhetorical strategies deepened their understanding.
Naturally, my students groaned, procrastinated, and produced something that seemed quickly put together to turn in before the due date. I’d spend conference periods and weekends reviewing their papers, wondering why they “still couldn’t write” after all the instruction and activities we did during pre-reading, actual reading, and post-reading of the novel. I felt as though I wasn’t purposefully having students write to learn.
It wasn’t until I read Janet Emig’s “Writing as a Mode of Learning” a few years later that helped inform what I misunderstood. What I thought was the conduit for having students demonstrate their learning (the literary analysis essay) was a means to an end, a form of assessment that was more transactional than demonstrable learning.
As Emig states in her opening paragraph:
Writing represents a unique mode of learning—not merely valuable, not merely special, but unique.
What changed my understanding of writing is this: Writing isn’t just a way to show what you’ve learned but a way to learn in the first place. In essence, we write to learn.
The Mistake
When it comes to having students write to learn, I (and I’d wager most of us) were trained to think of writing as a product, a product students produced after they’ve done the “real” learning. We give them a prompt, they give us an essay, and we grade it. This, ultimately, reduces writing to more of an assessment than an exploration of not just ideas but also growth.
Emig, however, argues that this framework misses the entire point:
Writing serves learning uniquely because writing as process-and-product possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies.
In other words, the act of writing is itself a learning strategy, a uniquely powerful one. Why? Emig identifies several key differences between writing and talking that make writing the superior learning tool.
First, writing forces us to slow down. We talk at about 150 words per minute and write about 20-30. As Emig notes:
Writing is self-rhythmed. One writes best as one learns best, at one’s own pace. Or to connect the two processes, writing can sponsor learning because it can match its pace.
The slowness of writing 20-30 words per minute is intentional; when students write, they can’t speed through their own confusion (though they may try to offload it in some capacity). They have to sit with their thoughts, wrestle with imprecise language, traverse through the muddle, and truly construct meaning.
Next, writing makes our thinking visible. Emig draws on the work of psychologist A.R. Luria who noted that writing:
Makes it possible not only to develop the required thought, but even to revert to its earlier stages, thus transforming the sequential chain of connections in a simultaneous, self-reviewing structure.
When students talk, their ideas vanish into the air. However, when they write, their ideas exist on the page, a page that can be re-examined, re-arranged, and re-imagined entirely.
Furthermore, writing engages our whole brain. Emig argues that writing is “markedly bihemispheric”, meaning that writing engages both the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
Writing is also integrative in perhaps the most basic possible sense: the organic, the functional. Writing involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain.
The left hemisphere handles the linear, logical structure while the right hemisphere contributes emotion, intuition, and those sudden flashes of insight. As Emig notes, “the right hemisphere seems to be the source of intuition, of sudden gestalts, of flashes of images, of abtractions occurring as visual or spatial wholes.”
Finally, writing creates immediate feedback. When a student writes, they can see what they think, creating a powerful feedback loop that shows how purposeful it is to write to learn.
A unique form of feedback, as well as reinforcement, exists within writing, because information from the process is immediately and visible available as that portion of the product already written.
Students can read their own draft and realize, “Wait, this actually make no sense.” It’s this self-awareness where real learning happens.
Applying Theory to Practice
Upon realizing how writing can improve learning, I decided to make some changes to how I approach writing and the teaching of writing in my classroom.
Write to Learn, Not Just to Report
Before, I’d assign writing only after we’d finish, for example, a unit or a serious of paired texts that explored a common theme. Now, I assign writing throughout a lesson or unit.
As an example, when we’re reading a dense primary source, I incoporate the practice of Chunk and Chew, where after 10 minutes of reading, students write for 2 about what they’ve read thus far, including what confuses them.
As Emig puts it:
Writing can sponsor learning because it can match its pace.
In other words, the writing isn’t a test of their understand. Instead, it’s the tool they use to build their understanding.
Bring Back Handwriting (especially in the Age of AI)
Emig draws on Jerome Bruner’s framework of the three ways we learn:
In enactive learning, the hand predominates; in iconic, the eye; and in symbolic, the brain.
When it comes to write to learn, writing uses all three simultaneously.
The symbolic transformation of experience through the specific symbol system of verbal langauge is shaped into an icon (the graphic product) by the enactive hand.
Put differently, when students write by hand, they’re learning through their hands (enactive), their eyes (iconic), and their brains (symbolic) all at once.
For the past few years (especially since AI’s prevalence in education), I’ve made the switch to analog modes of writing before students have an opportunity to go digital, the primary reason being that students often resort to AI to write their essays. While there may be some benefits of using AI to write to learn, it’s important that they know how to engage in the deliberate practice of writing. Otherwise, they risk losing that ability.
Protect the Slowness
Remember: writing is supposed to be slow.
Writing is a much slower process than talking. But then [Luria] points out the relation of this slower pace to learning: this slower pace allows for—indeed, encourages—the shuttling among past, present, and future.
Slow, deliberate, purposeful writing helps students connect ideas across time. A thought from three weeks ago, a question from yesterday, a sudden insight right now: all can come together on the page.
I used to rush my students with timed writing assignments and assessments. Now, depending on the task, I tell them, “We’re spending 30 minutes on a single paragraph for today. Take it slow. Try three different topic sentences. Cross things out. Start over. Use the time to your advantage.”
This isn’t to say there is something wrong with timed writing assignments and assessments since some exams have them (AP exams, for instance). However, when having students write to learn, it’s important for them to truly have the opportunity to engage in deep, contemplative practice that gives them an opportunity to learn by writing.
Offer Choice and Self-Pacing
Emig emphasizes the importance of personal engagement in learning:
Successful learning is also engaged, committed, personal learning. Indeed, impersonal learning may be an anomalous concept.
She cites several researchers—Polanyi, Pirsig, Kelly—all of whom stress that real learning often requires personal investment. And she points to a study by Sanders and Littlefield as “persuasive evidence” that self-selection of topics matters (though there may be times where students don’t have that choice as is the case with state or national assessments).
When I started letting students choose their topics—within clear parameters if the assignment called for it—their writing improved dramatically. They actually cared about what they were writing because it’s something they wanted to write.
Teach “Deliberate Semantics”
This is Emig’s term for one of writing’s most powerful effects:
In Thought and Language, Vygotsky notes that writing makes a unique demand in that the writer must engage in ‘”deliberate semantics”—in Vygotsky’s elegant phrase, “deliberate structuring of the web of meaning.”
Odds are you’ve heard students say a variation of, “I know what I mean, but I just can’t say it in writing.” That’s because talking allows for shorthand, context, and gestures while writing requires explicit expression of relationships.
The medium of written verbal language requires the establishment of systematic connections and relationships.
I now teach this explicitly. I show students the difference between what they can say aloud and what they need to put on the page for a reader to understand. We practice “translating” spoken ideas into written ones, adding subjects, verbs, connectors, things that sentence frames help with scaffolding the idea of turning talking into writing.
Final Thoughts
Emig ends her article with the following:
Unless the losses to learners of writing are compellingly described and substantiated by experimental and speculative research, writing itself as a central academic process may not long endure.
That was written in 1977. Nearly 50 years later, writing is still being squeezed out of our curricula, squeezed by standardized testing, by the pressure “to cover content”, by the lure of AI-generated shortcuts (that promote cognitive debt and cognitive offloading to a detrimental degree).
However, I think we know, intuitively, that Emig was right: Writing isn’t just an academic skill. Writing is a way of thinking, of making meaning out of chaos, of discovering what we actually believe.
Clear writing by definition is that writing which signals without ambiguity the nature of conceptual relationships, whether they be coordinate, subordinate, superordinate, causal, or something other.
A student who can write clearly can think clearly, and a student who can think clearly can navigate any challenge thrown at them.
And while we may be hindered when having students write to learn by things outside of our control (e.g. too many students, assigned duties and responsibilities outside our scope), the time I “lost” by slowing down and writing more was repaid tenfold in deeper understanding.
Slowly but surely, with lots of trial and error, many of my students stopped asking, “Is this on the test?” and started asking, “Can I write about this? I want to figure something out”, proving that when writing becomes exploration instead of performance, everything changes.
Writing is epigenetic, with the complex evolutionary development of thought steadily and graphically visible and available throughout as a record of the journey, from jottings and notes to full discursive formulations.
It’s that “record of the journey” that we’re giving our students. Providing them the opportunity to watch their own minds at work is a gift that lasts a lifetime, a skill that yields many benefits.
Have you tried using writing as a learning tool rather than just an assessment tool? I’d love to hear what’s worked in your classroom.
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