E073 · Learning, literacy & numeracy
Difficulty organising ideas in extended writing
What might be happening when a young person has ideas to communicate but struggles to organise them into a coherent piece of extended writing?
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Overview
Writing something down and constructing an extended piece of writing are different demands.
A young person may be able to:
- form letters
- spell many words
- produce individual sentences
- explain their ideas verbally
while still finding it difficult to transform those ideas into an organised paragraph, story, explanation, argument or essay.
Extended writing requires the writer to make decisions about:
- what they want to say
- which ideas matter
- what order they should appear in
- how ideas connect
- what the reader already knows
- how much detail is needed
- whether the writing still addresses the original purpose.
The difficulty may therefore lie not in having ideas, but in creating and maintaining a structure for them.
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What this might look like
A young person might:
- have many ideas but not know where to begin
- write ideas in the order they occur rather than a useful sequence
- produce very short pieces despite knowing much more
- include extensive detail while losing the main point
- repeatedly restart writing
- struggle to construct paragraphs
- move abruptly between ideas
- produce stronger oral explanations than written ones
- find open-ended writing much harder than tightly structured questions
- depend heavily on adult prompting to continue
- spend so long planning that little writing is completed
- begin strongly but lose the overall direction
- struggle to write conclusions
- produce much stronger work when given a visual plan or model.
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Developmental expression
At this stage
Early childhood
Adults appropriately support much of the planning for early writing. Differences may begin to emerge as children move from individual sentences towards connected text.
Early childhood
Adults appropriately support much of the planning for early writing. Differences may begin to emerge as children move from individual sentences towards connected text.
Middle childhood
Stories, explanations and increasingly extended curriculum responses require pupils to generate and organise more of the structure themselves.
Early adolescence
Different subjects introduce different writing forms — argument, explanation, analysis, evaluation and extended narrative — increasing the need to adapt organisation to purpose.
Later adolescence
Coursework, examinations, applications and independent study require young people to plan complex writing over longer periods with less immediate adult scaffolding.
Choose each stage to see how the presentation and surrounding expectations may change over time.
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Strengths and differences
Difficulty organising writing can coexist with:
- sophisticated ideas
- rich vocabulary
- strong verbal reasoning
- creativity
- extensive knowledge
- persuasive spoken communication
- excellent understanding of the subject.
A disorganised page should therefore not automatically be interpreted as disorganised thinking.
The process of converting thought into a form designed for a reader is itself a substantial skill.
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Top tips for support
- Separate generating ideas from organising ideas.
- Allow brainstorming before writing.
- Use visual plans or graphic organisers.
- Make the intended structure explicit.
- Show models of successful writing.
- Help the young person identify the main point of each section.
- Break large pieces into manageable stages.
- Allow oral rehearsal.
- Give sentence or paragraph structures where these genuinely increase access.
- Gradually reduce scaffolding rather than removing it simply because the young person is older.
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Things needing careful planning
E073 needs a strong boundary with E054 Difficulties with handwriting and written output.
E054: the mechanics or physical/output process restricts what reaches the page.
E073: ideas reach the writing process, but organising them into coherent extended text is difficult.
Both can occur together.
E073 also connects to E065, but narrative communication and written composition are not identical. Writing allows more planning and revision, while introducing its own demands around audience, structure and transcription.
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Practical support principles
Useful support may include:
- graphic organisers
- planning templates
- paragraph maps
- oral rehearsal
- model texts
- explicit strategy instruction
- worked examples
- collaborative planning
- identifying audience and purpose
- drafting and revision as separate stages
- self-monitoring prompts
- assistive technology where transcription also creates a barrier.
Writing-intervention research supports explicitly teaching planning, text generation and self-regulation rather than expecting these processes to emerge simply through repeated writing practice. A meta-analysis of primary-grade writing interventions found positive effects across writing outcomes, with effects differing according to the instructional focus and learner. (1)
From understanding to support
Phoenix Atlas connections
Often useful
- explicit writing strategy instruction
- visual planning
- modelling and worked examples
- metacognitive approaches
- task chunking
Worth considering
- Self-Regulated Strategy Development-informed approaches
- specialist literacy intervention
- assistive technology
- speech-and-language support where wider language organisation is relevant.
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Evidence and cautions
A best-evidence synthesis of early writing interventions identified transcription, text generation and self-regulation as distinct but interacting components of writing development, with interventions producing positive effects on writing quantity and quality. (2)
Experimental research also shows that explicitly teaching young writers how to plan the content and structure of their writing can improve composition, reinforcing the case for treating planning as something that can be scaffolded and taught rather than as a hidden prerequisite. (3)
Phoenix should nevertheless avoid turning one writing structure into the definition of good writing. Expectations about rhetorical organisation vary by genre, language, culture and communicative purpose.
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Public evidence sources
- Writing interventions in the primary grades — meta-analysis.
- Early writing interventions: best-evidence synthesis — best-evidence synthesis.
- Teaching young writers to plan text — intervention study.
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Possible explanatory lenses
Relevant possibilities include:
- executive functioning
- planning and organisation
- expressive language
- narrative/discourse organisation
- working memory
- attention
- handwriting/transcription load
- spelling
- perfectionism
- knowledge of the writing genre
- familiarity with the expected cultural conventions of the task.
About this entry’s source
Open Beta · read the evidence notes and limitations
Source status describes the underlying material. The current site edition is Open Beta; the evidence notes and limitations remain part of the entry.