Is Writing Important?

Writing can be an arduous, time-consuming, often frustrating task, especially for those who have dyslexia and other learning differences. Yet it is often a significant requirement in the school curriculum. There are now a large variety of tools available to help students get writing assignments done. One that I often see suggested recently is the use of AI. AI is getting more impressive every day and can certainly be used to create a full composition to fulfil many different requirements.

So, is original writing in 2024 still important? 

The problem with AI

AI makes writing assignments not only easier, it makes them more or less effortless. You simply type in a prompt and out pops an essay, story, poem- whatever you need. In my opinion, what makes using AI to create a composition problematic is not just the fact that teachers have tools to detect AI compositions, which could land a student in trouble; it’s not even the fact that using AI in general raises a lot of ethical concerns; it’s that the student is learning nothing about the subject matter while accessing their insta-essay. And writing assignments are designed to help students learn.

This begs the question- does writing actually help students learn?

The answer, in short, is yes! Writing helps students to learn in the following ways:

1. It improves reading comprehension

When you have to write, in your own words, about a subject, it requires you to do several things. For one, you have to figure out what the most important information is in order to write succinctly about it. Narrowing a topic down to its most important parts and working with the information to express it in your own words helps students to better understand that information.  Further, writing forces students to use more sophisticated syntax, which makes it more likely that they will understand it when they encounter it again in the future.

2. It helps store information into long term memory

Writing about a subject improves the ability to remember information in the long term because you are forced to spend more time thinking about the information and different ways to present it. It also activates more and different areas of your brain and gives your brain more details to trigger memory, especially when writing by hand. 

3. It develops creative expression 

Creating original compositions develops creative expression in students as they have to continually find different and unique ways of expressing their thoughts. 

4. It improves critical thinking skills

Writing a summary or essay about a subject forces you to manage and manipulate information in your mind. This allows you to see things from different angles, improving your critical thinking skills.

If writing is so important to learning, how then can we help students with dyslexia access this skill?

What makes writing so challenging to those who have dyslexia is that a lot of the working memory is tied up in the process of trying to encode words, leaving fewer mental resources to attend to the numerous other tasks required in writing. Writing truly is an arduous process for those who don’t have strong literacy skills. These skills can always be improved, but to make writing assignments more readily accessible in the short term I prefer the following for my students who have dyslexia:

1. Create an outline

   
   

Learning to create an outline before creating a writing composition is an essential skill for all students. The good thing about outlines is that you can (and should!) use as many shortcuts as you can for speed and ready access to the information; for example, using abbreviations, acronyms, symbols, and even pictures. This is done for speed and for quick and ready access to the information, but it has the added bonus of being a lesser burden on working memory because you don’t have to worry as much about spelling. Creating outlines also pushes students to figure out what the most important and relevant information is.

2. Use voice typing

When doing the actual writing, students with dyslexia can use voice typing. There are many free tools that have become very reliable and easy to use.  This, too, decreases significantly the load on working memory and allows students with dyslexia to focus on getting their ideas down.

3. Revision and editing

Revision and editing are essential steps for all students when completing a writing assignment. Luckily, there are now many free tools available. Many of them are built directly into writing software. Others need a free plugin, like Grammarly and Ginger. Even while using these tools, however, students need to get used to reading their writing over to themselves repeatedly to catch errors and to improve the structure and/or clarity of their compositions. Text-to-speech plugins would be very helpful to accomplish this task.

While writing assignments can be quite challenging for students with dyslexia, there are tools and processes that they can learn to use in order to make these assignments more accessible and to therefore ensure that they don’t neglect this important learning skill.