ABSTRACT
Students often hit their stride as fluent readers sometime during the years of third and fourth grade. Children are accustomed to thinking in terms of beginning, middle, and end when writing stories. They can use the same thought in organizing their nonfiction writing. Teachers need to remind students to take the time to describe the person, animal, place, or historical event that they are writing about. Redundancy must be considered a prime suspect for the limpness in most students’ nonfiction writing. Because a nonfiction text involves combining details and drawing relationships between various facts, it offers young writers the opportunity to stretch their abilities to write more complex sentences. The writing process movement has succeeded in energizing expressive writing (personal narrative, fiction, and poetry). Some students are comfortable pulling out facts from texts they read. But many students have a more visual orientation.
