I have a present for you: This slide deck, featured in this video, contains hyperlinks to various research articles, resources, and tools worth exploring if you're interested in learning more about why making is essential to the development of high-quality writing. It's substantive enough to serve as meaningful micro-professional development, but concise enough to remain engaging throughout. Let me walk you through a few highlights...

^{Redefining Literacy Beyond Words}

When we talk about literacy, we tend to focus on the production and consumption of written words. It's far more than that, though. Comprehension and composition are inherently multimodal processes, engaging multiple senses and faculties simultaneously. I've found that embracing expansive definitions of literacy and welcoming multimodal expression into my writing workshops and the classrooms where I meet young writers actually deepens comprehension and improves the encoding processes essential for learning.

^{The Cultural Dimensions of Writing}

What's particularly fascinating to me is how deeply culture and identity influence both comprehension and composition. Our dominant theories about writers, writing, and writing instruction have been heavily influenced by those descended from individualist cultures. But here's the thing—while individualism may be the dominant culture in the west, it's likely that many more young writers come from more communal cultural backgrounds.

This is a critical distinction. Culturally attuned teachers understand that western schools and the packaged curricula that fuel them are typically built by individualists for individualists. They know that each young writer's purpose and process can vary significantly. They know that multimodal expression invites human beings to fully express the whole of who they are, and that this type of expression enables us to communicate ideas that print alone cannot convey.

^{The Power of Structure in Multimodal Writing}

This is precisely why structure matters so much in writing instruction. When writers truly understand the structure of a form, they can use multiple modes of expression and different materials to represent each part. I've seen this happen time and again in classrooms—when learners are able to uncover the structure of any form and they're given permission to shape it multimodally, what emerges is often quite sophisticated.

When we coach transposition across modes and materials—helping students move from, say, a physical model to a verbal explanation to a written description—text complexity naturally rises. And when we coach the transition to written words bit by bit, that complexity is protected and enhanced.

^{Bridging Science and Creativity in Writing Instruction}

This approach becomes particularly powerful when we normalize the explicit instruction of linguistic and sentence structures, word functions, morphology, and Latin and Greek spelling conventions. Making, drawing, and speaking one small bit of a draft and then, using those power tools to transitioning that tiny bit of text to written words, offers writers the tools they need to compose complex ideas. And it happens within a creative context that they maintain complete ownership of.

Centering the structure of any form in unit and lesson design—rather than "the" writing process as it has commonly been defined—has been an essential shift. When we focus on structure first, learners use whichever modes of expression help them best represent their ideas. When they speak aloud what they intend to produce with written words as they describe what they've made, orality supports the production of more sophisticated written words as well.

This isn't about abandoning process altogether--it's about reconceptualizing it within meaningful structures that give students clear direction while still allowing for creative expression. The results I've seen speak for themselves: more engaged writers producing more sophisticated texts.

^{Join the Conversation}

Interested in learning more? Check out the video, explore the links embedded on each of these slides, and investigate the titles and scholars mentioned on the final one. Then, reach out if you'd like to talk.

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