Today on the Heinemann Podcast, The Writing Strategies Book author, Jennifer Serravallo. In 2015, The Reading Strategies Book made the New York Times Best Seller List by making it simpler to match students’ needs to high-quality instruction. Now, in The Writing Strategies Book, Jen Serravallo does the same, collecting 300 of the most effective strategies to share with writers, and grouping them beneath 10 crucial goals.  When we sat down to talk a few weeks ago, I wanted to know how Jen approached the organization of The Writing Strategies Book.



See below for a full transcript of our conversation:

Jen Serravallo: We considered organizing it by genre, so having like an information writing section, a non-fiction … a narrative writing section, an opinion writing section. We considered organizing it by process, like pre writing strategies, drafting strategies, revision strategies, but the truth is that so many of them actually overlap. For example, I don't only consider making my setting clear and my narrative after I've written a draft. I could. I could go back to my draft and say, "You know, I mentioned that I was at the supermarket, but I didn't really describe what it was like there" so I can … added more sensory details to make it better, but I can also do that thing before I draft it. I could, in my notebook, pre-plan how it is that I want my setting to look, or look and sound in the draft. I didn't feel like I could organize it by process because so many strategies I could use across the writing process, before drafting, during drafting and after drafting, and the idea of organizing it by genre there, again, I felt like there was a lot of overlap, so strategies that might help me to get ideas for coming up with a story, like thinking of important people in my life, hey, that could also help me come up with an idea for an opinion piece. I could think about those important people and the things they care about, and I could write to persuade them or I could write to convince them of something or I could write about something they care about too. I could also take those important people and write an informational piece all about that person. It feels like many of the strategies sort of went across different modes of writing, different genres of writing. Many different strategies applied across different points in the writing process. So the way I decided to handle it was to organize the book by goals, and then in the margin I have a note of which parts of the process that would work best with, which genres it would work best with, and also which grade levels it would work best with. I think a writing teacher approach is planning for a unit of study. Often times you're thinking, what's the genre? And what are the … and you're thinking about the process. I plan out how I'm going to teach my kids how to collect ideas and then choose one, and develop it and draft it, revise it, publish, edit. You think about the genre. What do I know about writing essay and how am I going to take that essay, the finished piece I envision, and plan out a sequence of lessons that are going to help my kids write well?

Brett:    Talk about what kind of writing goals you're helping teachers with in The Writing Strategies Book.

Jen Serravallo: There's 10, 10 writing goals. The first writing goal is about helping kids who maybe don't even write conventionally yet; maybe kids who don't know their alphabet or writing random strings of letters on the bottom of the page or have a little bit of ability to write words.