Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Writing Roadblocks

I'd appreciate your BTDT experience for how to help a struggling writer.

DS10 has ADHD. He is most affected by slow processing speed.

He is struggling with perfectionism.

He composes in his head, but something breaks down in the process of putting it in paper. It's not handwriting. Typing makes it worse.

He removes important content when he revises.

He ends up with short answer writing that does not address the question, doesn't have supporting details, and is inappropriately oversimplified to the point where a reader will think he doesn't understand what he is talking about.

He abbreviates concepts, distilling them down to an awkward or nonsense phrase that makes no sense to anyone except himself and sometimes me.

He has a writing tutor who is very experienced with gifted children. No progress, just more conflict at home.

He has struggled with writing for years. He does not have any trouble with grammar, spelling, handwriting, outlines/organization, conversation on the topic. He loves English language, adores literature, soaks up the history of rhetoric.

I'm feeling a lot of pressure over his writing because it's limiting what I can do for him for schooling. He's homeschooled now, 4th grade by age, and doing school at high school level *input*, but the *output* isn't there. He wants early college entrance, and besides for the writing problem, he's in a good situation for starting courses at community college. I'm really at the end of what I can teach him at home. He's getting into textbooks that I can't get teacher materials for. I have no idea if he's doing the work right or not! He does not want to go to high school and I'm in agreement that the community college is socially/emotionally a better choice for him. Community college would be lower stress also since he could take just the courseload that's appropriate for his executive functions, rather than mandated 7 classes at a time in high school. I'm feeling pressure to get his writing problems fixed before I'm not able to teach him any more.

Do you have any ideas of how to get him to write more freely or how to juggle his low writing ability with his high ability and need to learn?

Show him a sample writing of the *output* you desire. He might be able to mimic it.

Can you let him dictate some of his work? Some of the world's greatest authors used scribes. There's no shame in it.

I would agree that experimenting with speech-to-text would be a good place to start, and that he might benefit from trying a variety of graphic organizers and mindmaps until he finds one that meshes with his thinking style.

Although his writing tutor may be very experienced with GT children, the strategies that work with most GT learners may not be equally effective with 2e learners. Generally, when students with ADHD struggle with extended writing (which appears to be the case here), the challenges fall in one or more of: idea generation, initiation, organization, elaboration, self-editing. It may be valuable to observe his writing process and try to determine where the lapses are in those terms, so that scaffolding and remediation can focus on the most relevant areas. For instance, if he has a hard time getting started, idea generation and initiation are often implicated. If he can get a few stripped down points out, but struggles with supplying the supporting details, then elaboration is probably the difficulty. If there are good points, but no logical thread or argument, then organization is likely a concern. If he leaves out words or has a hard time distinguishing between critical and nonessential elements, then organization and self-editing are probably both involved.

Initiation, elaboration and self-editing are problems for him.

Initiation is the worst one I think. He gets an idea easily, refines it with an outline, and THEN he is stuck. I think he is overwhelmed with all the possible ways to say something. He usually gets stuck at initiation and goes back to idea generating - blames the idea for his stuckness and starts over.

Elaboration I think is an issue of being unwilling to do to the work required, whether that be writing the words or finding supporting facts. He also has an elaboration issue where he's resisting writing more than a paragraph. He refused to write down what he told me verbally because the point was "only 1/5 of the paragraph" and then it would be "too long". Where he gets the concept of "too long", I've no idea.

Self-editing is most problematic before he starts to write words on the page. It's also problematic in revising when he is unwilling to do the work required to revise. He has excellent revision skills when he is revising someone else's writing!

Seems to me that initiation is a mainly perfectionism, while elaboration and self-editing are more ADHD impulsiveness problems.

Thank you so much for your response aeh! You helped me clarify what problems are so we can focus on one at a time. I think initiation is the most concerning and easiest to modify. Do you agree?

It does sound like initiation would be the place to start. Sometimes it helps to provide a starter sentence initially, until he gets more comfortable with generating his own starters. Or he can try starting from the middle of the written product and working forward and backward from there. (I write many of my evaluations beginning from the third section, and wrote most of my school essays starting from the first body paragraph, not the introduction.)

DD used to resist elaboration other than in oral formats (and still occasionally does this even now, when she is overwhelmed by stress or tired)-- it's a sense that maybe OVER-writing is a "waste" of effort or something?

That is, if you edit it later and pare it down, then why bother writing all that 'extra' to begin with, right?

Scribing really, really helped her to realize that she was actually quite a good writer, but that she needed to just take the step to make the effort.

The rest was maturation which just happened in its own good time. You certainly have my sympathies here, though-- writing was THE skill set that limited our educational options with DD, and kept us from giving her more appropriate educational opportunities back when she was 6-12yo.

He finally wrote something today. I may have used a series of passive aggressive bribes. 😇 "It would be really sad if I went to OfficeMax and you couldn't come in and pick new notebooks because your writing assignment wasn't done."

"I cannot pick five plants to take to a different planet because there are too many assumptions involved. Earth is the only known planet with an atmosphere that isn't made of gases which are toxic to humans. If a planet has either a toxic atmosphere or no atmosphere at all, then I cannot go there and therefore I cannot take plants with me. Even if there is a suitable atmosphere, the climate might not be favorable for plants. This would result in my crops dying and I would eventually die of starvation. If I could find a planet with an appropriate atmosphere and climate, I would still have the problem of pollinating plants. On Earth, birds and insects pollinate plants. But on a different planet, where there is no life yet, my crops won't get pollinated and produce food. I cannot pick five plants because no matter what they are, it won't work to bring them to a new planet."

THERE! He FINALLY wrote a paragraph. 😂😂😂 I'm pleased - he organized his thoughts well, referenced the question, and wrote a full paragraph, thus meeting his tutor's criteria. He struggled at times with a preoccupation with "supporting facts" rather than explaining his reasoning. I'm very thankful that he had the experience of listening to my college English writing class discussing Glenn Beck. I pulled from that today to give an example of a writer using false facts and unsubstantiated claims to write a very convincing argument or explanation of his opinion. After recalling that example, DS10 was much less stuck.

aeh, thanks for the suggestion to have him start in the middle. I think it will work for him!

Thank you for the encouragement HK! I scribe his final draft. He hates rewriting after revising. I type for him since he has lost computer privileges, so he sees rewriting to be "pretty" as pointless if no one sees it. Fair enough, I guess!

I will make a suggestion. In this situation, I'd have asked him to pick some assumptions about one or more places on the imaginary planet and then take plants that would grow in the environment(s) he imagined. This process can bring some imagination into the assignment. The basic idea about making assumptions and testing them is used in the sciences and in engineering, and it's a good skill to develop.

Emm.

Also, not all plants have to be pollinated (it's a flowering plant thing). Land plants appear to have evolved on earth* well before land animals. As far as the exercise goes, this fact could create an opportunity to look up the kinds of plants that existed hundreds of millions of years ago, and the kinds of creatures who crawled out of the sea to eat them.

I would use this little mistake as an example of checking your facts before writing them down.

*It's complicated; amphibious plants and such; maybe there were worms --- but you get the basic idea. At some point, there were plants on the land, and sea creatures that managed to climb out of the water started to eat them.