The Demands of Middle School Writing

All middle school students, grades 6-8, are required to develop well-written compositions. According to the Louisiana Depart of Education (2008), to meet the demands of the comprehensive curriculum, these students are required to write complex multi-paragraph compositions with a clearly focused main idea and developed with relevant ideas, organization patterns, and structure that communicates clearly to the reader. The grade-level expectation also states that the students are required to use a variety of sentence structures, voice and word-choice to meet the audience’s expectations, and proper grammar and mechanics.

Besides being able to effectively communicate in written form in their curriculum, middle school students are expected demonstrate their writing abilities by writing a composition in response to a prompt, an exposition or a narrative in various forms, on the state-wide standardize assessment, LEAP for the eighth grade or iLEAP for the sixth and seventh grade, in the spring of each year. These compositions are scored with a rubric in four areas: selected vocabulary, selected information, sentence diversity, and tone and voice. In order to achieve maximum points the students need to have, among other things, consistent control in all these areas with appropriate, relevant word choices, vivid and power verbs and stylistic techniques, with information that is relevant and appropriate to audience, with a variety of sentences, and with a clear, vibrant tone and voice that engages the audience. (Louisiana Department of Education, 2008).

Scholars from the Institute of Research on Learning at the University of Kansas (Schumacker & Deschler, 2009), writing about the demands of writing for students stated: “according to thei...

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