Six+1 Traits Writing

Ideas: All writing has a clear message, point, plot, or theme. Good writers carefully choose details or supportive information to help their audience understand the message.

Organization: Good writers choose an appropriate form for their writing. The correct form helps the writer organize information and helps the reader follow the writer’s thinking.

Word Choice: We explore rich, colorful, precise language, which interests, moves, or enlightens the reader. Second graders learn to expand their vocabulary, collect fun words, and experiment with specific nouns, verbs and adjectives to make their writing unique.

Conventions: Writers must follow the conventions of writing, which include proper grammar, punctuation, spelling, and paragraph indentation. This helps their ideas to be read and understood, which is the purpose for all writing.

Sentence Fluency: Good writing mimics they way we speak. Writers use long and short sentences, and transitional phrases. They also try different sentence beginnings.

Voice: Great writers also have a signature style. A writer’s voice is a combination of word choice, ideas, organization, and sentence fluency uniquely their own. It sounds like the person that wrote it!

Presentation: Format and layout of the text. This includes neatness, good handwriting, margins and details, which support the text when appropriate (like diagrams, pictures and bullets).

As the year progresses, we explore, attempt and critique all of these writing traits. We create classroom rubrics for Conventions, Word Choice and Ideas that help us to evaluate our writing. These rubrics are kept in our Writer’s Workshop Notebooks and can be viewed on-line as well.