Your best traits

My students and I have begun using the Six Traits of Writing model in class and are working to answer one basic question: "What is good writing?"

The Six Traits, shown at right, provide a common language and framework for describing the characteristics of good writing. Still, evaluating a piece of student work can be very subjective, which is why I've become a big fan of rubrics. A rubric is a scoring tool that lists specific criteria and objectives for an assignment. It explicitly states what is expected and how the quality of a student's work will be rated. For my class, I'm consulting a number of rubrics based on the Six Traits of Writing, but here is a particularly student-friendly one I like.

In addition to discussing the rubric with my students, I'll be posting descriptions of each trait on a bulletin board. Web sites that feature some basic posters can be found here and here.

I've written about the Writing Process before, and I should mention that the Six Traits model is not a replacement for it. Rather, the two work together. The Six Traits describe the components that make up a quality piece of writing, while the Writing Process offers a step-by-step path to creating it.