Reader Response: I, You, and It-Moffett

Moffett’s I, You, It:
July 8, 2010
Reader Response
When I read Moffett’s article, “I, You, It”, I first focused on what a complex set of skills writers must have. In addition to all the mechanics of writing, Moffett tells us writers need to be able to summarize experiences, classify information to include or exclude it in their writing, and rename moments so that it becomes clear how they are alike or different. These are all very sophisticated and higher level thinking skills. Since I work only with struggling writers, this made me cringe. I was able to recover when he assures us that “Proper writing assignments can lead the students to good generalizations”. My job is to discover what those “proper writing assignments“ will be for my students each year. I appreciate his comment that a series of writing assignments is a series of thinking assignments. The implication for my classroom is that I need to model how good writers “think” through some group writing experiences and build in more time to conference with my students regarding their writing so that I can asses their thinking and check for understanding.

Another aspect of this article that called out to me was when he commented that too much writing about reading “freezes” the student at one end of the abstractive spectrum. This last year I felt somewhat successful in having an intermediate group of struggling writers respond to the literature they were reading and using that to work on the skills they needed. Although I do not in Moffett’s words believe this experience “impoverished” their education, it did not allow them to develop much voice in their writing. I will be careful to include more variety in their writing assignments next year.