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"Use this site to write, learn to write, take writing classes, learn about our campus writing center, and access resources for writing teachers. ToolsLearn to Write. View our extensive collection of instructional resources for writers, including writing guides, writing activities, and writing links. FeedbackGet Feedback on Your Writing. Learn how you can get help and feedback on your writing. SitesVisit Related Sites. Visit other Web sites that support the teaching and learning of writing. ToolsWork on Your Writing. Learn how the Writing Studio's tools - blogs, wikis, ePortfolios, bibliography, among others - can help you work on a writing project. ClassesView Your Writing Studio Classes. More than 5,000 classes have been created to support writers. Is your school using the Studio? TeachingTeach Writing. Learn how the Writing Studio and our other teaching resources can help you and your students. Writing CenterVisit CSU's Campus Writing Center. Visit our campus writing center, located in beautiful Eddy Hall, Room 6 (in the basement along the north side of the building). Our writing consultants will provide feedback on your drafts and help you with your writing and research strategies."

"Visual Writing Prompts is a great source for engaging writing prompts. You can browse their collection of writing prompts by genre, grade, or subject area. The prompts are written directly on each image. "While it's a great source of writing prompts already, it is a site in-progress. They are in the process of adding additional information to each prompt. The prompts that have already been completed include a prompt explanation, an explanation of any relevant vocabulary and language, and a convenient one-click download button." I always used a set of images, culled over years of browsing magazines and newpapers, as writing prompts for various types of writing. This site has the prompts built-in, which can be an advantage for the busy teacher, or a disadvantage if you don't want to find something that precisely fits your assignment goals. You can also have students create their own portfolio of images and prompts to share with other writers. T/H to Nick LaFave.

"Poetry writing is an excellent practice for strengthening one's writing skills. Through poetry writing, we gain command of language, cultivate a robust vocabulary, master literary devices, and learn to work in imagery. And that's just a small sampling of how poetry improves basic writing skills." Articles discusses the emotional and intellectual benefits of reading and writing poetry.

Nice ideas, and a downloadable sheet to get a free teaching aid: "At one time or another, most of us suffer from writer's block and have a terrible time coming up with story ideas. We stare at a blank page, unable to come up with clever story starters or generate ideas for stories to write. In a way it traps us and keeps us from doing the one thing we want to do most when we sit down with a paper and pen in hand or in front of a computer: write. The more time we waste and are unable to come up with ideas for writing stories, the more we get discouraged. That's why we have something to help kick-start your muse.In this free online download, you get two weeks worth of top-notch writing prompts designed to spark your mind and help you flex your creative muscles. From fiction prompts to poem starters to short stories ideas, you'll be able to generate creative story ideas based on a sentence or two of direction."

Besides stimulating creativity, creative writing enhances learning and the intellect. I've found using creative writing in "regular" essay writing classes helps students feel free to use more colorful, metaphoric language to describe processes or emphasize the points they were making. ESL students have told me they didn't think English could be an expressive language until I helped them use to write poetry.

"Dyslexia is a learning difficulty which affects the ability to adopt the automatic reflexes needed to read and write. Several studies have sought to identify the source of the problems encountered by individuals with dyslexia when they read. Little attention, however, has been paid to the mechanisms involved in writing. Sonia Kandel, Professor at the GIPSA-Lab of the Université Grenoble Alpes (CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes/Grenoble INP) and her team [1] decided to look at the purely motor aspects of writing in children diagnosed with dyslexia. Their results show that orthographic processing in children with dyslexia is so laborious that it can modify or impair writing skills, despite the absence of dysgraphia in these children. The findings of this study are published in the November 2017 edition of Cognitive Neuropsychology." A serious problem that can influence aspects of language learning.

The targeted audience of this website is high intermediate and advanced ESL learners, and in particular TOEFL test takers. This website focuses on teaching how to write an argumentative and opinion essay. It provides information on argumentative essay structure, teaches about two different essay layouts and supports them with examples, explicitly describes steps of argumentative essay writing process, gives a number of model argumentative essays, demonstrates two sides of an argument, and has 70 argumentative essay topics, and 155 TOEFL writing topics. -- From Lena Shvidko

"WritingFix: For Teachers, Students & Writers interactive prompts, lessons, and resources for writing classrooms Since 2001, the Northern Nevada Writing Project has proudly sponsored this free-to-use website, which aims to "fix" those teachers who don't believe that writing instruction can be both fun to plan and easy to differentiate. If you explore our website's pages, you will find prompts, lessons, and resources that were created and shared--and then posted here--during workshops and in-service classes sponsored by the NNWP. The Nevada teachers who participate in these professional development opportunities discover ways to be passionate about teaching writing, and here we share the very best, hoping that our passion is contagious to the teachers across the globe who have discovered what we've proudly posted here. Our Mentor Text Bibliography can help you directly link to lessons and prompts based on books you might already own. "

A lament on the Common Core Standard's reinforcement of the 5-paragraph academic essay, and a call for the teaching of more authentic types of writing. S. L. Davis's list is long, and sparks a lively comment on the purposes of writing.

Writers may not need any of these tools, but your students might find them helpful in learning to write better. The list includes MyBlogU, which is a social, crowd-sourcing way to write by asking help of others and helping them in their writing projects. Might be interesting as a way to get further language practice. AtomicWriter helps identify audience through some clever AI. Bunkr app is a presentation program with some interesting capabilities, and so on.

See related article on using photos to read and write. Photos can be used to inspire writing, but also teach/practice syntax. For example, ask not just what details are seen in the picture (e.g., descriptive writing, universal present tense), but predict what will happen in the future (future aspect, conditionals).

Recommends Ferris & Hedgcock and Kroll

" StoryJumper is a free, online storybook maker. With awesome resources for teachers, StoryJumper provides an easy way for to empower students to make their own storybooks. Students write the story and illustrate them with artwork from StoryJumper, or by uploading their own images. Student books can be shared online for free, or purchased in paperback or hardcover format. It's a great way to inspire a passion for writing." The teacher starts by creating a class so that students can enter the site and write privately. Students must be over 13 to participate. The teacher can also set up a collaboration option to create group books.

" The printables encourage writing and thinking in a quick and fun way. A student's efforts to complete the printable can then become the first step in writing longer essays, poems or stories on the same subject. The printables also can be used with students enrolled in literacy and English-As-Second Language (ESL, ESOL) programs and provide an educational resource for teaching language arts." Over 250 printables that can be used for writing prompts.

This web resource is for teachers of high beginning and intermediate writing courses and intermediate ESL learners. The resource provides 8 units that 1) teach about paragraph structure and paragraph elements: topic sentence, supporting sentences, and concluding sentence 2) introduce transition words and coherence in a paragraph 3) provide the opportunity to learn about and practice basic writing skills such as making an outline and staying on topic. Clear explanations are supported by examples; therefore, teacher can use this resource for class preparation, and ESL learners can use it as additional material to learn about paragraph writing. Practice activities provided by the website are not interactive; however, most of the assessment tasks have answer keys. In addition, each unit provides lesson in a PDF format that can be used by a teacher as a handout. -- From Lena Shvidko For ESL K-12 learners, but would be useful for adults as well. Focuses on the paragraph, rather than the essay, so makes a good beginning set of lessons.

This is not about the technical how-to of G-Docs. The teacher instead discusses the pedagogical aspects of how collaboration works, as students write a collaborative essay and discuss it together as they write. The teacher also explains how she does formative assessment as the students write. Using Goggle Docs she can see who contributes and how much.

"Bookcase for Young Writers is a free web companion to our book Kids Have All the Write Stuff: Revised and Updated for a Digital Age to be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in Fall 2019. "This online bookcase features virtual shelves filled with literature, apps, and interactive digital tools to inspire children from preschool and kindergarten through the upper elementary grades to become confident, expressive, creative young writers. "It includes fiction, nonfiction and poetry as well as picture books, chapter books, and e-books. It has links to child-engaging information and topics related to the all writing ideas in the Bookcase. "This bookcase is intended as a starting point for children, teachers, families, librarians and other adults who want to read books that will inspire writing. T/h B. Maloy

" Mind maps are content- and purpose-agnostic. Use them for anything that requires thinking, planning, organizing, or writing." This is the third of three articles (linked here) ab out using mind-mapping productively. Great article for teaching writing. It's not all about "outlines."

An excellent video of the teacher and students using the lesson plan, this lesson from the Teaching Channel walks you through preparation for a writing assignment. It was developed through an EQuIP Peer Review Panel to ensure alignment with the Common Core standards, and was created by teachers and administrators working with the Massachusetts Dept of Elementary and Secondary Ed Model Curriculum Project. It uses a "Smart Chart" to deepen student understanding of rhetorical devices and has students collaborate in a ranking activity. Has links to a place where you can submit your own lessons for a free EQuIP panel review, and links to other related lesson plans.

Four interpretations of guides to help in writing objectives using Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive learning objectives. These are set out in table format with sample questions and assessments. They should all be very useful in writing curricular objectives and analyzing proposed activities.