How To Teach Writing Fluency

This blog first posted on January 8, 2022, and was re-issued on May 3, 2025. These days there is much interest in reading fluency, but writing fluency has an important role to play in literacy development, too. As I predicted in this piece, new research would eventually demonstrate that writing quality depends greatly on writing fluency (Kim, 2024). In fact, without writing fluency, you are not likely to see much good writing. If students cannot effortlessly get their words onto paper, they will struggle to write well. This blog provides several practical recommendations for making this happen and it cites some of that newer research on these issues.

Teacher question: What can you tell me about writing fluency in grades K-5? Our district is making a major effort to improve writing which is great, but our kids don’t write much. I don’t mean that the teachers don’t give writing assignments (they do), but the writing that the kids produce is very limited and it takes them a long time. I can’t see how we can improve their writing if they can’t write more.

Shanahan response:

Writing fluency is a slippery fish. Definitions of the term vary greatly within the profession (Latif, 2013). Not surprisingly, those differences in definition result in a wide variety of advice for teachers on how to facilitate fluent writing. Accordingly, researchers interested in the matter have spent most of their efforts towards figuring out what fluency is or its relation to writing quality.

I’m with you about the importance of the amount of writing, though research is not very supportive of the idea that increasing amount of writing improves fluency (Skar, et al., 2024). Basically, the research suggests there are other more important impediments to success in this area. My advice: get kids writing more often but don’t just increase the dosage.)

Personally, I’m happy that anyone is paying attention to this at all. For a long time, the literature on children’s writing seemed to emphasize quality over fluency. This was done by promoting revision heavily, even in the primary grades. Revision is important, of course, but it only helps if you have gotten your ideas onto paper in the first place. Revising a blank page is an empty exercise.

National and state assessments don’t consider fluency issues directly either. They might get at it incidentally by marking a paper down if its ideas aren’t sufficiently developed. However, lack of development can be as evident in papers with lots of words as in those with few. Although the tests don’t directly measure fluency, I suspect that most readers have trouble crediting a paper that isn’t “sufficiently” long – whatever that may mean to the evaluators.

I’ve long believed that writing fluency – as much as writing quality – should be a major goal in the early grades (my first publication in the field was about how I had successfully facilitated writing fluency in my classrooms – Shanahan, 1977).

Over the past couple of decades there has been a growing body of research revealing the pivotal role that handwriting and spelling play in writing fluency, and the newer studies are reinforcing these conclusions. Experience tells me that instruction in handwriting and spelling can facilitate automaticity, but so can an emphasis on invented or developmental spelling – reducing student anxiety about potential errors, while providing valuable practice with phonemic awareness and phonics at the same time. And newer research supports the idea that encouraging kids during drafting to spell words the way they think they are spelled and let the rough side drag (Schrodt, 2024).

Researchers these days often divide writing into its components. For example, one popular model separates transcription (getting ideas onto paper) from the ability to generate or compose ideas (Berninger & Winn, 2006).

Sadly, studies that have tried to disassemble writing fluency have left us with a bit of a muddle. I think their expectation has been that fluent transcription includes “lower” skills like spelling and handwriting, while idea generation depends not on these mundane skills but on world knowledge and language proficiency. Things don’t divide up that neatly, however.

In that regard, writing fluency is a lot like reading fluency. For the youngest students and the poorest readers, reading fluency is largely the result of automatic decoding ability – but with development, some aspects of reading comprehension are implicated too (through prosody). Writing has a similar pattern of progression apparently, with printing and spelling sucking up much of the variance early on, but with executive function and oral language increasingly insinuating themselves into the equation as writers progress (Kim, 2024).

That shouldn’t be too surprising. There are many reasons people have trouble getting their ideas on paper.

Kids often tell me that they don’t have any ideas, they don’t know what to write about. That may be an accurate appraisal of their situation, or just a convenient excuse for avoiding what for them is an unpleasant and potentially embarrassing task – there are both cognitive and affective reasons for balking at a white page. When students at any level voice this problem, I talk with them about their ideas. Their thoughts often flow easily in our conversations but vanish in the monologic situation required of writing (Scardamalia, Bereiter, & Steinbach, 1984).

Another enemy of writing fluency is perfectionism. “If I can’t produce something perfect – that won’t embarrass me – I can’t possibly write.” Concerns about handwriting and spelling may limit fluency. Many kids hesitate when they come to a word that they think they can’t spell, or they engage in wasteful mental gymnastics trying to avoid expressing ideas that would require those words. That’s why both improving handwriting and spelling and reducing the emphasis on these during drafting can support fluency. Handwriting issues tend to play an important role in writing fluency early on, but its importance diminishes soon (Juel, 1988). It is sometimes recommended that keyboarding will improve fluency, but the results of this have been mixed at best (Goldberg, Russell, & Cook, 2003; Spilling, et al, 2021).

Perfectionism raises its ugly head another way, as well. Writers often are impeded by premature and seemingly infinite revision and editing. They write a sentence and then rewrite it. Young kids may manage to get a word on paper and then try to erase and improve it before they even get to a second word. This composing, decomposing, and recomposing prevents writing fluency and undermines writer confidence. Few things are more painful than watching a child tearfully laboring over his wordless paper, blotched and torn from these constant revisions. Jacques Derrida referred to this as “interminable revision” and there are scads of electronic writing tools aimed at preventing the problem for adult writers (e.g., Write or Die, iA Writer, OmmWriter, Freewrite Smart Typewriter).

What can you do to improve writing fluency?

1.     Teach handwriting and spelling explicitly. Such instruction has been found to improve both fluency and quality of writing (Graham, McKeown, Kiuhara, & Harris, 2012). I’m a big fan of combining phonics and spelling instruction. The idea is to teach these skills to the point of automaticity. A youngster agonizing over how to form the letter G is not thinking about the ideas that he/she wants to communicate to readers.

2.     Lower the emphasis on spelling and handwriting during drafting. This may sound like I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth – teach spelling but don’t require it – but that isn’t really the case. Handwriting and spelling facilitate communication. The more legible your handwriting and the more accurate your spelling, the more likely it is that readers will focus on your ideas.

However, during drafting, these skills don’t matter much. Encourage (beseech, implore, beg) students not to worry about their spelling or handwriting while drafting. And don’t undermine this encouragement by spelling words for them or marking up their errors on an early draft.

I know that some teachers and parents worry that if a child misspells a word that it will, from then on, always be spelled. However, both research and personal experience reveal this not to the case. These early spellings tend to be pretty plastic, they change with experience. (In fact, this admonition is reminiscent of the oft repeated, “Your face is going to freeze like that” which told to children making goofy faces. Mine never did.) Young kids benefit from spelling words the way they think they are spelled because it requires them to analyze the phonemic structure of those words. These “spelling inventions” change as students learn more about words – and that will come from spelling, phonics, and morphology instruction.

3.     Discussion and planning can play an important role in writing fluency. Research has long found that getting kids talking about what they want to write about improves and makes more efficient the flow of ideas. For the youngest children, drawing about their topic can have the same kind of payoff. As children move up the grades, getting them to list or chart their ideas can be useful, too.

4.     Require a lot of writing. New research indicates that issues like handwriting and spelling are more important than amount of writing when it comes to fluency (Skar, et al., 2024). I think that is right – if the question is about a hierarchy of importance. Nevertheless, I can’t see how anyone can gain proficiency in getting words out of their heads and onto paper without practice.

 Students should be reading and writing throughout the day. They should be writing as part of reading, science, social studies, and math. As with any skilled activity, practice plays an important role – and given the learning benefits that writing about a topic can provide (Graham & Hebert, 2010) it should be a go-to activity in the curriculum. One of the side effects of that should be increased opportunity to develop fluency.

5.     Engage students in non-stop writing (Datchuck, 2017). The linguist S.I Hayakawa required his college freshman comp students to write – without stopping, rereading, or revising -- for an entire class period. John Holt had his fifth graders doing the same for 15 minutes. As a primary grade teacher, my students wrote non-stop in multiple 1-2-minute intervals (Shanahan, 1977).

I’d provide a prompt and then have the students writing non-stop for 1 minute. Then I’d give their hands a rest and change the prompt and have them write for 90 seconds more. Finally, another break was followed by 2 more minutes of non-stop writing. Students who don’t know what to say next are to rewrite their last sentence until they have an idea (promoting “thinking while writing” as opposed to “thinking as a prelude to writing”).

With the beginnings of three compositions in hand, students can begin to shape and improve their ideas. Sometimes I’d have them pick the one they liked best for completing. Or perhaps I would ask them to combine all three into a single paper. Over time, the students gained facility: they could generate a lot of sentences about an idea quickly, they could write and think simultaneously, and because of the limitations of such writing, they came to see the value of revision and editing. 

Writing fluency has been neglected for too long. It may not seem important, but it is a key ingredient in writing quality.  

References

Berninger, V. W., & Winn, W. D. (2006). Implications of Advancements in Brain Research and Technology for Writing Development, Writing Instruction, and Educational Evolution. In C. A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 96–114). The Guilford Press.

Datchuk, S.M. (2017). A direct instruction and precision teaching intervention to improve sentence construction of middle school students with writing difficulties. Journal of Special Education, 51, 62-71. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022466916665588

Feng, L., Lindner, A., Ji, X.R., & Joshi, R.M. (2019). The roles of handwriting and keyboarding in writing: A meta-analytic review. Reading & Writing, 32, 33-63.

Goldberg, A., Russell, M., & Cook, A. (2003). The effect of computers on student writing: A meta-analysis of studies from 1992 to 2002. Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment, 2(1), 3–50.

Graham, S. (2009-2010). Want to improve children’s writing? Don’t neglect their handwriting. American Educator, 20-27, 40.

Graham, S., McKeown D., Kiuhara, S., & Harris, K.R. (2012). A meta-analysis of writing instruction for students in the elementary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104, 879–896.

Juel, C. (1988). Learning to read and write: A longitudinal study of 54 children from first through fourth grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 437-447.

Kent, S., Wanzek, J., Petscher, Y., Al Otaiba, S., & Kim, Y. (2014). Writing fluency and quality in kindergarten and first grade: The role of attention, reading transcription, and oral language. Reading & Writing, 27(7), 1163-1188.

Kim, Y. G. (2024). Writing fluency: Its relations with language, cognitive, and transcription skills, and writing quality using longitudinal data from kindergarten to grade 2. Journal of Educational Psychology, 116(4), 590-607. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000841

Kim, Y.G., Gatlin, B., Al Otaiba, S., & Wanzek, J. (2018). Theorization and an empirical investigation of the component-based and developmental text writing fluency construct. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 51(4), 320-335.

Latif, M. (2013). What do we mean by writing fluency and how can it be validly measured? Applied Linguistics, 34(1), 99-105. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ams073

Ouellette, G., & Sénéchal, M. (2017). Invented spelling in kindergarten as a predictor of reading and spelling in Grade 1: A new pathway to literacy, or just the same road, less known? Developmental Psychology, 53(1), 77–88. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000179

Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C. and Steinbach, R. (1984), Teachability of Reflective Processes in Written Composition. Cognitive Science, 8, 173-190. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0802_4

Schrodt, K., FitzPatrick, E., Lee, S., McKeown, D., McColloch, A., & Evert, K. (2024). The effects of invented spelling instruction on literacy achievement and writing motivation. Education Sciences, 14(9), 1020. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14091020

Shanahan, T. (1977). Writing marathons and concept development. Language Arts, 54(4), 403-405.

Skar, G. B., Graham, S., Huebner, A., Kvistad, A. H., Johansen, M. B., & Aasen, A. J. (2024). A longitudinal intervention study of the effects of increasing amount of meaningful writing across grades 1 and 2. Reading and Writing, 37(6), 1345-1373. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-023-10460-0

Spilling, E.F., Rønneberg, V., Rogne, W.M. et al. (2021). Handwriting versus keyboarding: Does writing modality affect quality of narratives written by beginning writers? Reading & Writing. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10169-y

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