Blending Writing Skills

Writers need to blend skills to craft rich texts that show their voice.

Voltaire said “writing is the painting of the voice”. To paint rich texts, children need a mix of skills that we initially teach through story, non-fiction and poetry. For children to find a voice in their writing, they need to be able to blend skills to craft texts that engage the reader. And knowing which skills to choose and blend is as nuanced as how much blue and yellow make turquoise. 

1) Primary Colours 

To support children in blending skills, start plotting them onto a colour wheel. Blue for poetry as poems can be sombre; red for fiction as stories are full of excitement and yellow for non-fiction. Yellow reminded of double yellow lines for all the differing formatting rules. 

2) Mixing colours 

When starting a text, we go to the colour wheel and use it to talk about our aims for the piece and what writing we have done that is similar to this. We reflect on prior learning and what techniques we could use again. 

3) Mixing Colours 

When starting biography writing we discussed how it is the factual story of a person’s life. It is a non-fiction text, but equally a story as it is written like a narrative. That means we will need to think about our fiction skills too. Do we want a purely chronological structure? Would an exciting event from the middle of the person’s life make a better opening? What about setting descriptions? Dialogue or quotes? Discussions that lift our biography from being a simple chronological report into an exciting text made of short stories that brings the person to life.  Blending fiction skills to animate a character rather than describing an object. 

4) Tertiary Colours 

Travel writing mixes a whole host of tertiary colours into its format. Is it a report or persuasive writing? To sell the location we need vivid descriptions, calling upon poetic skills. For this text type we had two different “pallets” of skills, one non-fiction and the other poetic.  

The main ‘colours’ will be an introduction, sections by theme and a punchy conclusion that sells the location. Mixed in with this will be key points highlighted by rhetorical questions and repetition of interesting features. Whilst informative, it will create a flat and rather yellow piece of writing. Time to add in some blue and create a piece as inviting as those turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea.  

Simile, tick. A metaphor form emotion engagement? Maybe alliteration when describing the sea, repeated sounds to conjure the lapping waves. But when to use them? A metaphor and rhetorical question in the introduction will engage the reader. In our facts about the location simple prose, no need to complicate, and slow down, the reading. The reader needs those facts for context but it doesn’t sell the location. Now we can pick a key aspect and use simile and alliteration to build a rich description. Longer sentences to slow the pace of reading. We don’t want the reader skipping ahead too quickly to the final sell in the conclusion. 

Conclusion 

The colour wheel aids students in reflecting on prior learning from all writing units. Planning writing prioritises the reader over content, fostering conversation of when to use a technique in a text for maximum impact. And it is that impact on the reader by which we measure if our “painting with the voice” has made its mark on the page. 

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A shorter version of this article was originally published in teachPrimary. You can see the online version by clicking here.