6-Traits Resources

Retired NNWP Consultant and friend of WritingFix, Joe Elcano, loves to tell the story of his son writing an strongly-opinionated essay about Barry Bonds taking the national home run record. The teacher required Joe's son to share his essay in class with his writing response group; the three members of the group gave a little feedback, but not as much as the writer was hoping for. At home, Joe encouraged his son to polish up the essay once more time, and then post it on a national sports blog for feedback. Within twenty-four hours, the essay received hundreds of responses. Some comments were--of course--unintelligent disagreements, but Joe had prepared his son that this would probably happen. Many of the responses were thoughtful and helpful, even from readers who disagreed with Joe's son's opinions. As Joe explains, "This was the most authentic writing task my son had ever experienced. Did he take writing the essay more seriously when he decided to publish it where thousands would see it? You bet he did."

Mesa Public Schools uses the 6+1 Writing Traits Model to guide the instruction and evaluation of writing. Mesa Public Schools has selected a 6-point rubric to use for assessing writing in accordance with the 6+1 Writing Traits Model. MPS rubrics are available in a student-friendly format with simplified langauge and alternative terms for use in with students in the classroom.

Learn to teach and assess writing with the 6-Traits of writing 
(voice, ideas, word choice, organization, sentence fluency and conventions). Learn to use the 6-Traits with the writing process to teach revision strategies. Help learners meet higher standards and improve test scores.

Bryan Hutchinson: I love quotes about writing.

Below each quote is the name and blog link to the blogger who provided the quote. Special thanks to everyone who provided a quote. I added click-to-tweet to most quotes, but some were too long to be tweetable.

Slick Write is a free tool that checks your writing for potential stylistic mistakes and other features of interest. Whether you're a blogger, novelist, or student writing an essay for school, Slick Write can help take your writing to the next level. Curious? Try a quick demo, or enter your own text in the editor tab. After submitting, four more tabs will appear at the top of the screen:

• Critique - This tab contains the body of text with stylistic features highlighted.
• Structure - Here you will find the sentences color coded by type and length.
• Flow - Hold your readers' interest by maintaining good flow.
• Stats - This is where you will find important statistics on a variety of subjects including readability, word frequencies, and repeated phrases.

In 2006, after looking over our still-growing collection of on-line lessons, we asked ourselves, "What would make these lessons even more useable to teachers?" The answer we kept coming back to was "Student samples."

We set this long-term goal for ourselves: "By 2011, let's provide a range of student samples for every lesson and prompt featured at this website."

WritingFix is currently in the process of finding these samples. We started by collecting samples from Nevada teachers (which is where WritingFix began), but soon we began receiving e-mailed samples from all over the U.S.A. Now the entire globe has represented.

Any teacher who is thinking about submitting a student sample for possible publication should read the information provided on this page.

To post any student's piece of writing, you need to be a member of our Online Student Publishing Group at our site-sponsored Ning. Join today!

Sentence Fluency is just one of the six writing traits. In Nevada, where only four traits (ideas, organization, voice, and conventions) are "officially" assessed on the fifth grade state writing test, you can elements of sentence fluency embedded on the state's conventions rubric. So, as we say in our trait trainings, even though sentence fluency doesn't have its own rubric on the state test, teaching it well can improve students' convention scores.

Sentence Fluency is a complex trait that should be discussed, explored, and further developed every year that students learn to write in school; both kindergartners and high school seniors can be taught to think about developmentally appropriate skills that are associated with sentence fluency. This page contains sentence fluency lessons and resources that we consider appropriate for sharing with third graders and up. If you are working with primary writers and the six traits, be sure to visit WritingFix's 6 Traits and Primary Writing Homepage for lessons designed specifically for those grade levels.