ABSTRACT
Writing is both a process and a product. One advantage of using CONCEPT rather than QWERTY is that it speeds up the writing process, giving children a greater sense of achievement. Providing opportunities for pupils to respond to one another’s work during the writing process helps to bridge the difficult gap between talking and writing. One of the hardest things for the youngest writers to grasp is that the reader is a different person. Peter Hunter has proposed a hierarchy of concerns which occupy children more or less simultaneously during the writing process. The ease with which a computer screen can be viewed by more than one child simultaneously makes joint writing a practicable activity. There are some modes of writing that particularly lend themselves to joint effort – story-telling, for example, in which children write alternative paragraphs, each one demonstrating some development of the narrative.
