What to do with the next Dr. Seuss in your classroom?

There are two ways to teach writing: teach the skills and allow it to lead to good writing, or teach how to be a good writer and add in the specific skills along the way. In my opinion, the second option is much more valuable. It is easy to teach a student how to create a proper sentance and correctly place a coma. It is much more of a challenge to analyize how a good writer writes and how a student can grow into such a writer.

The 12 Writing Essentials allow teachers to embrace this idea, and allow students to develope their style and skill simualtaneously. The 12 Essentials are important becuase they can be used across the grades. The ideals and practices are transfered from year to year, only the skills taught are more advanced as the students move from grade to grade.

Some of the Essentials are basic and easily teachable. Writing for a specific reader and meaningful purpose (1) is basic enough to teach at the primary ages and quite necessary for any piece of writing. Determining an appropriate topic (2) is impossible to avoid when starting a piece, but it is important to specifically walk students through this essential part. Presenting ideas in a clear and logical way (3) is the meat and guts of teaching writing. It is so, so important for a teacher to give students a variety of tools to help them organize their writing. Other Essentials are just as vital and more or less easily taught, like elaborating on ideas (4), embracing language (5), engaging leads (7), satisfying endings (8), and correct conventions and form (10).

Other Essentials are less simple to teach. Crafting an authentic voice (6) is probably the most important aspect of good writing-- and the hardest to teach. How do you even begin to teach such a huge topic of individuality and style? You cannot teach someone to be creative and true to themselves. You can give them the tools to find their own creativity and provide an enviornment that is safe for them to explore their voice and stye, but it is still a very abstract idea to teach. On top of that, it is even more difficult to teach voice to a student who is just emerging as a writer. Where do you draw the line between voice and inproper grammer and/or poor writing. Is Hunter S. Thompson a good writer with an excellently authentic voice, or is he a poor writer who throws all regards to grammer out the window? How about Dr. Suess and his dictionary of made up words? In these cases, I think it is in the eye of the beholder. Do you stop the next Hunter or Seuss by emphasizing proper sentance structure and correct spelling, or do you let style and voice develope and blossom?