Pairing Technology With 6 Traits of Writing Instruction

6 Traits of Writing Approach

Graham et al. (2011) assert that students who learn to write well fare better as they progress through K–12 academic requirements, postsecondary academic requirements, and on into their adult employment. Many educators, however, feel unprepared to teach writing, especially if they are in specific content areas like science, social studies, or other areas beyond language arts (Kohnen et al., 2016; Myers et al., 2016). Likewise, students who struggle with writing, especially those with learning disabilities, need explicit instruction to support the development and execution of writing (Graham & Harris, 2013). One instructional approach common in the K–12 classroom is the 6 Traits. The 6 Traits are often seen as a structure to support writing instruction, serving more as a framework than a writing program. The 6 Traits model was developed in the 1980s and asserts that good writing has six key traits, which include ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions (see https://educationnorthwest.org/traitsformoreinformation). The 6 Traits serve as key components that provide teachers and students a guide for how to generate ideas, compose, revise, and then assess various types of writing (e.g., narrative). These 6 Traits are not a curriculum but rather a set of qualities that help define, generate, assess, and describe good writing (Coe et al., 2011). Indeed, research suggests that 6 Traits may produce negligible or no benefit to student writing (Graham, et al., 2015) and yet, they are described as a common language for teachers and students to determine what is and is not working in their writing product (Culham, 2006) and can be used to facilitate explicit instruction. With the development of the CCSS, efforts have been made to crosswalk and correlate the traits and the standards for narrative, argumentative, and informational/explanatory writing.

For each trait, there are practical and creative technology enhancements that can support all students, especially those who struggle. Pairing these 6 Traits with technology has the potential to effectively meet the needs noted earlier of teachers who feel insecure about writing instruction and promote effective outcomes for those students with disabilities who struggle with writing. We offer these paired technology solutions below.

Ideas

The first of the 6 Traits is ideas. The ideas of a writing product include the main message and supporting details. Students with disabilities (e.g., learning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), often struggle with identifying ideas for a writing task. Challenges in reading are often the primary cause. Limited skills in reading comprehension reduce student content knowledge. Students with limited foundational knowledge often do not have information to draw from and thus, ideas are restricted or incomplete. A common solution to support student acquisition of new knowledge is offering them some sort of published text, for instance, a website or a reference book and yet students with learning disabilities also struggle to develop a reflective practice with reading as compared to more proficient writers and readers in their peer group and thus they struggle to analyze and draw evidence from written sources (Joseph & Ross, 2017). Likewise, students with disabilities find it difficult to decide on a topic, generate supporting details, or offer reasons to justify their main points (Kiely, 2018). Over time, these students become reluctant writers, struggling to get started in the writing process and unable to generate text. Over time, their anxiety grows, and they find themselves making little to no progress. To support students in generating ideas, technology can be a helpful solution (Saulsburry et al., 2015). For example, AnswerGarden (Creative Heroes, n.d.) is a free tool where teachers or students can state a question and request responses from other people. A student or teacher may type the question, “What is the most exciting thing that could happen to you?” and send the link to peers via text or Google Classroom (classroom.google.com) where ideas can be generated by class members. Students click on the link, read the question posted in AnswerGarden, and type their response. The result is a word cloud where the most frequently mentioned items grow larger than items that were mentioned fewer times. This example gives students a starting point with ideas that they can choose from instead of having to generate on their own.

Interactive whiteboards or collaborative spaces are another option for idea generation. Padlet (Goel, 2008) is one of several web-based tools that allow one to generate ideas via a series of stickies, posts, or additions to a virtual bulletin board. Padlet is meant to be a collaborative space where students can add ideas via words, images, video, graphics, and the list goes on. Students can add anonymously if they are hesitant to claim an idea or thought. Not limited to words, ideas can also be represented through pictures, audio files, and other multimedia that students generate or more likely, find across the web and insert via the Padlet tool. The result is a list of ideas developed by an individual or a group of individuals. Ideas that can then be structured for a writing task.

Organization

Once ideas are generated, they need to be organized and arranged in a clear order including a beginning, middle, and end. This is a complex task requiring executive functioning skills that allow students to plan, organize, strategize, and regulate how to approach a task. The second of the 6 Traits requires students to organize their thoughts so that there is a thread or pattern and sequence that fits into a central idea. For students with disabilities, challenges with executive functioning skills exacerbate the organization and planning that is needed for this second trait. Without the necessary supports, students who struggle with organization and structure tend to spend less time planning their writing and in turn, have difficulty putting their ideas into a meaningful and purposeful order (Rouse & Sandoval, 2018). Even if students have generated ideas, lack of structure, poor sequencing, and similar challenges in organization will often prevent students from developing a connected piece that helps the reader understand the central theme. Technology tools that support organization include Popplet (Apple, Inc., 2013), Inspiration (Inspiration Software, Inc., n.d.), Kidspiration (LearningWorks, 2020), Storyboard That (Sherman, 2012), and a host of other interactive graphic organizers.

For example, Popplet (Apple, Inc., 2013) is an interactive graphic organizing tool that helps students structure ideas by dragging and dropping them into various categories and order in preparation for the drafting of paragraphs. Organization tools like Popplet, Inspiration (Inspiration Software, Inc., n.d.), and Kidspiration (LearningWorks, 2020) offer multiple features for altering shapes, connecting thoughts with arrows or lines, and using different colors/patterns to visually show relationships between different ideas, thus providing students who struggle a tool for supporting progress (Ewoldt & Morgan, 2017). These apps also allow for various media including images, pictures, and videos to further represent ideas supporting learners as they seek to structure their paper. Some of the interactive graphic organizer apps convert a graphic web into a traditional outline (e.g., Inspiration), useful to further facilitate the writing task. A word of caution on the broader family of mind mapping apps, which Popplet and Inspiration are often included. Unfortunately, not all mind mapping apps and web-based tools are equal, particularly for students with disabilities. A number of these mind mapping apps were developed for the business world or similar audiences (e.g., Mindmeister [Meister Labs, 2020] or Mindomo [Expert Software Applications, Inc., 2007]). They are often limited in the ability for the learner to use video, flexible arrows to connect ideas, patterns and colors, and other critical supports that facilitate organization for students with executive function challenges.

Other apps and web-based tools that support student organization reside in the broad area of storyboards or even interactive digital storybooks. A popular storyboard web-based resource is Storyboard That (Sherman, 2012). Storyboard That allows students who are generating a story to organize scenes sequentially with pictures. For instance, a student may be writing a narrative story and they know they want to begin with a football game where their favorite team wins the championship, then move to their favorite pizza place to celebrate, and end up at home to rest after having a wonderful time. Storyboard That provides empty boxes with already generated images of people, places, and things that students can drag into each scene to help tell their story and then add text to offer additional details. The structure of the storyboard requires the students to place their idea into a sequence. The images, graphics, and text bubbles offer tools to illustrate their idea, enriching the information, and further building their writing in an organized sequential manner. Similar to the interactive graphic organizers, digital storyboards provide engaging and motivating opportunities to structure and order one’s thoughts before they begin writing their story in paragraph or essay form (Saulsburry et al., 2015).

Voice

Voice is a 6 Trait that involves exhibiting the personal tone of the author. Often seen as the most important of the 6 Traits, voice is where the writer comes through to their audience offering a sense that a real person is speaking to the reader. The heart and soul of writing is exhibited through voice where the author engages the reader and shares with them their knowledge of the topic. This trait is often accomplished through good sentence structure, effective word choice, and the use of intentional punctuation. For students with disabilities, their struggles in reading comprehension can often hinder vocabulary knowledge, which is needed in facilitating a student’s voice (Baker et al., 2003). Likewise, students with disabilities struggle with syntax or the rules in language for assembling words to form sentences (Troia, 2014). Forming sentences requires a writer’s semantic (i.e., word usage in context), grammar, and mechanical (e.g., application of punctuation rules) application. Problems in any of these features impact the voice of a writing product.

Teachers can support student development of voice in their writing by alleviating challenges with spelling and handwriting and allowing their students to speak their words into a speech-to-text software (Cannella-Malone et al., 2015). By helping students use the built-in speech-to-text feature on a student laptop, tablet, or mobile device, they can speak their thoughts and ideas in a stream of consciousness, conversation style and then go back through the written text to edit and refine. For example, Google (n.d.) Docs offers a Voice Typing Tool to facilitate speech-to-text. Increasing, Microsoft (n.d.) products like Word and Outlook offer a dictation tool for their own version of speech-to-text. There are also a number of assistive technology tools developed specifically with speech-to-text functions including wordQ (Quillsoft, Ltd., 2020), Dragon Naturally Speaking (Nuance, n.d.), and a host of similar supportive word processors. Thus, depending on the digital tool a student used to organize their ideas (e.g., interactive graphic organizer or outline), they can then use it as a guide when they open a word processor and speak their story into their device.

Students who struggle with voice often follow a limited step-by-step structure of a paragraph or essay where they regurgitate rote text. While this produces text on paper, the student’s personality does not come through in their writing. Technology tools that facilitate a student’s voice drawing out their personalities include comic or comic strip creators. Digital comic creator apps and web-based sites can be used to quickly generate an animated story utilizing comic visuals, conversation clouds, characters, and text boxes. These supports facilitate the generation of ideas while allowing students a forum to infuse their passion, personality, opinions, and whimsy in their writing. Examples of web-based comic creators include Make Beliefs Comix (Zimmerman, 2006) or Pixton (n.d.). Each provides premade characters (including various emotions and poses), backgrounds, thought and speech balloons, and a variety of other tools that facilitate student development. Apps like Toontastic (Google, n.d.), or Puppet Pals HD (Polished Play, LLC., 2018) offer further digital solutions to facilitate sentence structure and bringing one’s personality to their writing. For example, Toontastic offers a traditional background, characters, and similar digital features while also providing a writing structure. The embedded structure is meant to facilitate the structure of the writing, support the ideas that the student is trying to integrate into the writing, and in turn, allow for their personality to come out in the cartoon. Of course, the digital comic could serve as the writing outcome or easily serve as a draft to be transferred into a traditional paper. By offering students alternative mediums like digital comics to write in and by letting students speak their ideas instead of having to focus on the physical creation of text, students have more opportunity to discover what works best for them to share their Voice with their audience.

Word Choice

Another 6 Trait is Word Choice. Word choice is the vocabulary used by the author to form a mental picture of the author’s message. In persuasive writing, for example, strong and purposeful word choice clarifies and expands ideas, moving the reader to understand your vision. Effective word choice is characterized by a combination of vocabulary and skill in the use of everyday words to communicate your thoughts and ideas to the reader. Students who struggle with word choice tend to choose common, generic words that illicit unclear or muddy visuals for the reader. As students read more and are exposed to more vocabulary, their word choice may expand; however, purposefully modeling the use of powerful, illustrative words can support a more conscious focus on spicing up the words used for writing. Modeling allows students to visualize what they want to share. By seeing examples, students realize they are not so much telling their audience as they are offering a descriptive narrative. A digital tool that can foster this process is video. Simple descriptive videos that are increasingly available to teachers and their students, such as those found on YouTube (Google, n.d.), offer a number of channels designed by educators and entertainers, specific to topics such as boosting word choice. For instance, the Jack Hartmann Kids Music Channel is packed with videos on educational topics, one of which is called Vivid Verbs (Hartmann, 2019). The Vivid Verbs video can be used to engage middle school students in the topic of word choice, model examples, and nonexamples of strong word choice, and then ask the students to enhance their own writing by choosing three to five words to boost.

Once students have examples of strong word choice and understand they are in the description business, they will most likely continue to struggle to generate the strong words that they want to produce. Another digital solution is word prediction. Word prediction is increasingly a standard tool for most writing. For example, it is rare to find a mobile device without some sort of word prediction available to support and sometimes aggravate (e.g., producing the incorrect word), the writing process. As a basic tool, word prediction generates word options to facilitate the writing process. However, not all word prediction tools are equal. Instead, for the student with a disability who struggles with word choice, word prediction offers a number of critical supports through its various features.

Central to word prediction is the word list that is automatically generated for the student. As a student types, word prediction detects what letters are being typed. With each typed letter, word prediction offers a list of (e.g., five) words that it thinks the student is trying to write. As the list appears, the student can often hover over the word, depending upon the word prediction app, in order to listen to the word being read aloud. When the student identifies the appropriate word, they can select the word, type the corresponding number (e.g., 1–5), or continue typing the word to insert it into the writing. Generated word lists will also offer suggested words. For instance, a student might begin a sentence with the word “The.” Word prediction would then offer a list of words that would be appropriate to continue the student’s thought. As a student uses word prediction, many apps will identify a topic or list of common words being used and begin to provide these suggestions as part of the word list. There are also advanced word prediction options available to provide supports for word choice. For instance, Word Bank Universal (Google, n.d.) allows a student or teacher to enter a topic, such as “Jurassic Period,” or “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” and the software will predict words, based on that topic. Students are more likely to find words related to their topic if they are enhancing the power of word prediction with a word bank. By providing examples of strong word choice and modeling the use of strong word choice while also offering students opportunities to practice with word banks customized for their topic, students who struggle have tools to support the use of powerful and illustrative words in their writing.

Sentence Fluency

The next trait is sentence fluency. Sentence fluency is how well a paper flows within and between sentences and paragraphs. Students who struggle with sentence fluency tend to have incomplete, fragmented, or run-on sentences, or they may use the same word repeatedly to begin sentences or to make transitions between different topics or ideas. They also struggle to generate text and thus, applications like word prediction, mentioned earlier for word choice supports, can enhance sentence fluency. However, one digital tool or family of tools that can often impede sentence fluency, and thus a teacher or student may consider turning off, are grammar and spell check features. For example, word processing applications (e.g., Microsoft Word, Google Docs) have historically offered convention tools that identify writing errors. In Microsoft Word, a red squiggly line underlies a potential spelling error, while a green line suggests a grammar error. These tools are excellent for some students to realize needed challenges in their drafts; however, for some students with disabilities, particularly those with attention challenges, these visual prompts can often impede fluency. For instance, instead of waiting to return to their draft to correct their writing error, students with disabilities often stop and correct the error immediately. This impacts the rhythm and flow of the language as well as the word patterns being generated through fluency of the thought process, which often facilitates sentence construction. An easy fix to this distraction is to turn these convention tools off during the drafting stage. When sentences are complete and ready to be reviewed, simply turn the tool back on allowing for the rainbow of colors to appear identifying potential errors in the writing. For students who find the added color overwhelming, teachers can offer an initial grade, feedback on the content (not the mechanics), or a similar strategy prior to the spelling and grammar corrections. This would reinforce rather than discourage the learner as they apply energies to needed edits.

If students are unsure of how to construct quality sentences, it is also important to teach and practice each type. There are four different types of sentences including simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex. Each type of sentence needs to be explicitly taught examples and nonexamples shared, and students need an opportunity to practice and locate them (Troia, 2014). One suggested strategy would be the use of social media to facilitate sentence fluency. By sending students out to current social media outlets to identify examples of the various sentence types, learners are further engaged in ways to explore written text and thus, learn about sentence fluency. In a 3-year study, funded by the National Science Foundation, to explore how social media could be used to support student learning and teacher instruction, researchers found that with proper guidance on digital citizenship and teacher articulated search parameters, students can learn within the engaging digital social spaces that they tend to frequent during their free time (Rowland, et al., 2017). Through purposeful use of text-to-speech features on digital devices, and by allowing students to discover how sentence fluency is used on social media, struggling writers can increase the readability and flow of their writing in order to better share their message with their audience.

Conventions

Conventions are the final trait. Conventions include spelling, grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and paragraphing. Students who struggle with conventions may struggle to draft, edit, and revise their writing (Ok & Rao, 2019). To support students who struggle with conventions, there has been an explosion of online grammar checks. One of the most popular is Grammarly (Grammarly, Inc., 2009). These online proofreading tools identify deficiencies in the text, highlight errors, suggest grammar and punctuation corrections, and check for fragments, tense, and even dangling modifiers. As the student types, errors are identified and by hovering over the potential error, Grammarly, Ginger (Ginger Software, n.d.), and similar applications provide suggestions for correcting the problem. Similar to Microsoft Word, many of these digital tools will color an error (e.g., red, green, blue) so that the student can understand their error is misspelling (i.e., red) and a suggestion for writing style (i.e., blue). As these tools continue to grow, they can be applied to a variety of writing platforms including word processing docs, blogs, web page applications, and of course, email applications. Likewise, the proofreading supports are increasingly expanding beyond conventions offering options to rephrase text while also recommending synonyms and definitions. Products like Ginger and Grammarly offer students a level of independence as they struggle to make meaningful revisions to their drafts (Rouse & Sandoval, 2018).

Conventions can be further improved by conducting a read-aloud. Listening to what one wrote is an effective strategy to determine the mechanical correctness of one’s draft. Reading a draft aloud allows a writer to hear errors in their sentence, paragraph, and the entire essay. They may have left a word out, made grammatical or punctuation errors, shared an incomplete thought, or a host of other problems. By reading aloud where you follow along word by word at a moderate pace, the writer allows their brain to process what they have written.

In today’s digital age, text-to-speech offers a great read-aloud tool for identifying potential errors in punctuation, grammar/usage, and overall writing. Increasingly built into web browsers or word processors (e.g., ReadWrite), students can select a sentence, paragraph, or the entire essay and have each and every word highlighted as the computer reads it aloud. Students can set the pace to ensure it is at an appropriate level to identify potential errors. As the text-to-speech highlights and reads a word, the student gets visual and audio support to identify errors or challenges in their writing. Thus, teachers can support conventions by facilitating the use of built-in text-to-speech settings on their writing devices (e.g., iPad, laptop). By allowing students to hear what they wrote, they may be more likely to hear what sounds awkward instead of having to use their cognitive load to both read the text and determine what sounds awkward within (Ok & Rao, 2019).