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Improving Proficiency in the Writing

Organization of Elementary-Aged Special

Education Students

By Emily Malotte and Nicole Smith

Current research clearly indicates that effective writing organization is a necessary component
for student work to be comprehensible. Writing-organization strategies allow students to share
their thoughts clearly, and teaching of these strategies makes writing curriculum more accessible
to students with disabilities. The authors share writing-organization strategies that are used in
small-group settings with special education students and that can also have a positive impact
on the writing proficiency of all students.

When a sailor decides to take a journey, he doesn’t simply push his boat into
“the water, hike up the sail, and then wait to see what happens. Sailors have a
planned course ahead” (Serravallo, 2017, p. 185). Organization and planning are
skills that apply to countless areas in students’ lives. Organization deals with desks,
backpacks, cubbies, and, most importantly, writing. Written organization is defined
by two key traits, coherence and cohesion. Coherence is the ability to make words,
sentences, and paragraphs that have logical connections in their ideas, and cohesion
is the ability to transition between ideas in a logical sequence (Halliday & Hasan,
2014). The use or disuse of either can mean the difference between the reader’s
ability or inability to understand what is being conveyed.
In order for students to contribute their thoughts and ideas in a meaningful way,
hold a job, or continue their education, they must be able to write effectively using
coherence and cohesion within their work. The skill of writing organization must be
developed as early as kindergarten when students first begin to produce sentences.
Therefore, it is essential for elementary teachers to introduce and reinforce writing
organization successfully with their students at the scope of sentences as well as
paragraphs (Serravallo, 2017).
In What a Writer Needs, when discussing how to teach time sequencing, an
important aspect of organization to students, Fletcher (2013) mentioned that
students who do not understand how to sequence their stories effectively will write
out all of their thoughts in a list-like format. In a narrative story, doing this would
look like a student sharing every minute detail of the day because that is how they
experienced it. However, students who do understand how to sequence effectively
will use strategies such as the omission of unimportant details or cause and effect to
relay the events of the day. Such cutting out of the unnecessary parts of the day or
blending the details of the day into a cause-and-effect chain will thus better illustrate
the voice of the student throughout the piece. Students who still practice the “listing”
sequence can have the aspect of voice within their work, but it falls short due to the
robotic nature of the “and then… and then… and then…” (Fletcher, 2013).
Writing organization is critical because students are asked to display what they
know and what they have learned through writing. Writing is not an isolated skill
during the set “writing time.” It is a skill that is demonstrated and practiced throughout

6 The Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin: International Journal for Professional Educators