The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword: Podacst

Linguist, writing aficionado, consultant and founder of Lifelong Literacy Lyn Stone will be explaining – through her trademark eloquent language - just how difficult writing is, and the number of things teachers can do to improve their students’ writing, which has been consistently worse than reading in this country for some time.

Her piece is entitled The Pen is mightier than the sword. I urge all teachers, particularly kindy, preschool and primary teachers to listen to the messages in this piece.

In it she discusses the Simple View of Writing (SVW), which covers everything from pen control; spelling, punctuation and sentence constructions; and vocabulary and ideation. Stone is so passionate about this as these skills must be taught early in schools by well-trained teachers, with automatic the end goal.

Her fear is that, once all training has been exhausted, the "ship has sailed" as far as students' writing achievement, contributing to lifelong disadvantage. . She also tackles issue with the a well ingrained idea that spelling is based on some opaque and archaic system, which doesn't follow any predictable rules.

Stone brings writing back to the micro level, urging her students to "give her a few effective sentences" rather than a full page of incoherent, clumsy text, which is often asked of primary school students.