Four Blocks by Doug Sundseth

Real-author first-draft technique:

1) Stare at the blank page until drops of blood form on your forehead.

2) Dip your finger in the blood and write a sentence.

3) Repeat until done.

BTW, can somebody recommend a product that will remove blood from a monitor?

8-)

b-ass ackwards
what do authors do?
Four Blocks by Doug Sundseth
Vlorbik on what authors do
cranberry on the real world
Writing Block
Sifting and Sorting Through the 4-Blocks Literacy Model

what do authors do?

Letting children see what adults and good writers do when they need a word they can't spell is important. Authors don't stop their writing and look up a word. They keep writing and spell the word as best they can. Then they hope that spell check will find and fix it. If not, they depend on their editor to be sure everything is correct before going to print!

Writing Block

First of all

First of all, authors can spell.

I once asked Barry Seaman about this. Barry, I said, do editors ever deal with writers who can write but can't spell? He said, basically, No. We happened to be sitting in the audience of a spelling bee at the time, along with Bob Massie, the third member of our team, waiting our turn to compete. Bob said he couldn't spell, but I am here to tell you he's wrong. He can spell.

On the other hand, not one of us could spell flokati. Flokati, come to find out, is not spelled floccati. The correct spelling is flokati. With a k.

Still and all, when 3 authors hear 'floh-kah-tee' and spell it floccati, that is what we call the exception that proves the rule. Authors can spell.

The reason authors can spell is that Learning to Read and Learning to Spell Are One and the Same, Almost. All authors can read; therefore all authors can spell.

True: spelling is harder than reading. But authors are really, really good readers.


And second

Second: supposing an author is steaming along writing stuff down -- lots and lots of stuff, just like they do in Writing Block -- when all of a sudden, out of the blue, she needs to spell the word flokati and she can't remember whether flokati is Greek (with a k) or Italian (with a double-c).

What does she do?

She stops writing and looks up flokati.

The reason she does that is that she is not steaming along writing lots and lots of stuff down. She is sitting in agony eeking ekeing or eking^* out one word, then another word, then possibly another, then hitting back space-delete and starting over again, and that's on a good day, after her 14-year old son has tipped her off to the existence of an Application for Macs that turns off the internet so she can't check her email or read or write a blog about education.

Your choice: write a coherent paragraph about the impulsive-compulsive dimension that other human beings will pay money to read, or look up the word flokati in the dictionary.

I'm taking a poll.

b-ass ackwards
what do authors do?
Four Blocks by Doug Sundseth
Vlorbik on what authors do
cranberry on the real world
Writing Block
Sifting and Sorting Through the 4-Blocks Literacy Model

^* thank you, Jean

b-ass ackwards

advice for teachers from Four Blocks implementer, Cheryl Sigmon:

All at once, I've been besieged by emails concerning spelling in the Writing Block at upper grades. Nancy, a fourth grade teacher in New York, who's enjoying her move to Four-Blocks wrote, "Cheryl, do you think it's important that we misspell words in our model writing daily? It really makes me cringe every time I misspell something, and I'm worried that my students may begin to pick up bad habits from the misspellings I'm modeling. I don't think I can continue to go against my better judgment to spell words correctly! What do you suggest?" Also, Cathy, a curriculum specialist,¹ wrote to ask, "How do you respond to a group of teachers who feel it is of the utmost importance to spell everything correctly when writing in front of the students? These are 4^th and 5^th grade teachers if it makes a difference."

[snip]

First of all, teachers certainly don't want kids to think they can't spell! Our worst nightmare is that Johnny will go home and tell his parents, "My poor teacher can't spell a lick when she writes in front of the class!" Then, of course, the parents are either on our doorstep the next morning or in the principal's office wanting our teaching certificate revoked! In a minute, we're going to be sure that everyone understands why we model misspellings² in front of our students.

[snip]

Next, as far as teachers feeling that they must always spell every word correctly in their model writing, I feel that puts unnecessary stress on the teacher and that it might even be counterproductive to what we've trying to accomplish with students as writers. I would never want to give students at any grade level the impression that perfection is a goal of first draft writing. There are many opportunities in later drafts to edit our work. When producing the first draft, fluency in our writing---getting down our ideas---is the objective. I want to model for my students how to "overlook" possible misspellings by putting down my best guess and circling the word. The circling gives students "permission" to keep writing and provides a marker for returning to correct words they've had to guess.

What we're modeling isn't misspellings. We're actually modeling strategies for how to handle misspellings while we're getting our ideas on paper. Just as we teach students what to do when they come to a word they don't know when they're reading, we also teach students what to do when they come to a word they can't spell in their writing. We want them to be cognizant of the high frequency words they know, the many word patterns, and the meaningful word chunks---all of which will help them make a reasonable guess about the spelling of a word they want to use. We don't want to teach students that they should stop and look up words in the dictionary or the thesaurus during rough draft writing. The rough draft stage of writing is not the appropriate time to do so. That's done in later drafts when editing. We also don't want them to ask us how to spell for them. "The teacher won't spell for you" is a steadfast rule made clear to students in the beginning of the school year. It liberates the teacher, who has more important responsibilities, and liberates the students, too!

Sifting and Sorting through the 4-Blocks Literacy Model by Cheryl M. Sigmon

So we've got grade school kids writing & rewriting multiple "drafts" before they can spell.

Typical.

Here's a question.

Do you think there's a writer on the planet who makes his best guess about how to spell a word, writes that down, circles it, and comes back later to figure it out when he is "working on a further draft?"

Even when he's writing by hand?

I don't.

As to teachers who have "more important responsibilities" than telling students how to spell a word, I guess that explains the 5 years my household has now devoted to Megawords.


b-ass ackwards
what do authors do?
Four Blocks by Doug Sundseth
Vlorbik on what authors do
cranberry on the real world
Writing Block
Sifting and Sorting Through the 4-Blocks Literacy Model

¹ I'm against curriculum specialists
² it's not like we don't have numerous studies demonstrating The Negative Impact of Seeing Misspelled Words or anything