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 The Writing Traits: Word Choice helping your students "go deep" with owning their words during classroom writing instruction This page's introduction comes from the Northern Nevada Writing Project's Going Deep wi I was asked by a time-pressed teacher once, “So should we not even teach word choice then?” She was kidding. I was glad she was kidding. There was a long moment of silence when I wasn’t sure a joke had been presented by her question, but then she smiled, and we all laughed. Talking about state tests often brings out the cynical humor from our best teachers. I am one of those occasionally cynical teachers too. So I’ll cynically ask you now, “Why teach word choice, if it’s not assessed on the state writing test?” Discuss! Done discussing? Time for my two cents? Two reasons, from my perspective: One…it’s the most enjoyable writing trait to design mini-lessons around; perhaps that’s overly opinionated and thus debatable, but I am a lover of etymology, a celebrator of language’s sounds, and a self-proclaimed expert at making up brand new words when the word I want hasn’t quite been invented yet. Two…it’s the trait that—if you’re not quite sure how to teach your students to have a voice—well, it’s a safe place to begin; voice is the weirdest of all six traits—the easiest to spot in good writing, the hardest to teach a student to have. I was lucky. I had voice long before I had an extensive enough vocabulary to practice true word choice. I was also a fast writer; I could whip out a pretty good rough draft in half the time of my classmates. Because of that, my sixth grade teacher once accidentally gave me a word choice lesson that sticks with me to this day. I was done writing. There were twenty-five long minutes left in that class. I was beginning to distract my neighbors. My teacher picked up a thesaurus and asked, “You ever used one of these before?” I had, with worksheets, but not ever when I was doing any real writing. I shook my and was told, “Find some uninteresting words in your draft and change them to better synomyns.” Long-story-short, my draft became ridiculous. I can’t remember what my paper was about, but I distinctly remember changing the word meal into the word refection. That was just one tiny spot where I horribly squeezed my own voice from the draft. I did this throughout my paper before the bell rang, and the next day I noticed my paper didn’t feel like mine anymore. These weren’t my words; they belonged to the thesaurus. Lesson learned. Never forgotten. Word choice, I told my own students many years later, is not about using big words to impress your teacher or to send your reader scrambling for a dictionary. Word choice is about writing with the words that you actually want to carry around in your pocket for conversation. “The trick is,” I told my students, “to never stop collecting. Life is about collecting new words that fit what you like to talk about. To prepare for my vocabulary/spelling test, practice using new words in conversation all week long; after the test is over, keep just the words that fit you by placing them in your pocket alongside your already-owned words, and use your new ones as often as you can. Scrap those words that aren’t yours until you study for your S.A.T. someday.” Above all else, teach your kids to write using new words they really like. If they can write with an interesting word, and the writing still sounds like the way they talk, they have grown tremendously as a writer, and they’ll have one more “pocket word” to take them through life. And—believe it or not—they have begun to find new voice with a single words. FYI: In 2005, word choice made it to the Nevada writing test’s rubric, as a bullet point for voice. The state’s voice rubric specifically asks about the student’s word choices. |
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