My kids hate doing them, but they've significantly benefited from highly structured graphic organizers. It appears to help separate the cognitive demands of coming up with ideas, composing, and physically producing the words.
This sounds like a great idea.
Yes-- and also, structuring writing prompts to be either clearly right/wrong sequentially/temporally, or narrative in a linear fashion.
DD was VERY anxious about her (admittedly poor) organization as a writer for a very long time. Every essay, every term paper, we faced the same problem: she knew a LOT about the topic-- could have easily
talked to someone for an hour without interruption and little repetition. Writing it coherently was another matter entirely.
She had a great deal of trouble even with graphic organizers-- it just wasn't the way her brain worked.
So we used
timelines. This meant that every prompt for a period of about four years, she had to find SOME way of organizing it into a sequential thing-- timelines, linear narrative, biography, etc. It really helped to reinforce that need to pre-write and organize, which she otherwise refused to cooperate with.
She also had a tendency to fill outline style organizers with complete sentences, and then have such a bare-bones or non-fluent finished written product that it didn't reflect either voice or knowledge at all. I still chalk this one up to laziness, in part. She *can* do it now-- she just doesn't bother some of the time.
Move on from timelines to Venn diagrams and compare-and-contrast as a "form."
I find that doing those two things lays the groundwork to be able to use graphic organizers more proficiently. Initially, my DD couldn't figure out HOW to arrange ideas into a logical heirarchy on paper, which made even graphic organizers a disaster.
Her perfectionism, of course, only made things worse, because she was singularly uncooperative with this deficiency, given that she didn't want to do anything that she wasn't good at-- and BOY, was she not good at organizing her thoughts in written form.
