ABSTRACT
Many teachers of writing, probably, begin their careers with a body of largely untested beliefs and limited professional skills and have in the main to learn as best they can from the successes they achieve in the classroom and the mistakes they make. There is a wealth of common-sense knowledge among teachers that testifies to the failure of traditional classroom approaches - decontextualised exercises, spelling corrections, textbook explanations of punctuation or sentence structure. If pupils experience difficulties within this holistic context, then their teachers can offer on-the-spot help as they arise or after reading and responding to what has been written. Pupils like Lesley do seem to 'learn to write by writing'. And it was easy to accept that what was appropriate to her was in principle appropriate to all pupils. Traditional exercises in writing skills failed to enable children to master the writing system so that they could communicate their meaning in a piece of independent, extended writing.
