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Have you ever tried to read a social media post full of typos? What about a news article with poor punctuation? You likely had difficulty understanding that content because it lacked familiar writing conventions.
Today, we’ll explore what writing conventions are, why students need to learn them, and give tips on how you can help teach writing conventions at any grade level.
Writing conventions are the universally agreed upon writing and language rules authors use to make texts clear and easy for readers to understand. Specific conventions may vary by writing type, audience, language, or culture. Despite these variations, the types of conventions that classify good, clear writing stay the same.
[Why do students need to learn writing conventions?](id-why)
Writing conventions are essential tools to help make your writing as clear and accessible for your audience as possible.
Students, especially as they advance through school, are expected to use writing to demonstrate their knowledge, share ideas, and perform well on standardized tests. Since conventions are the foundation of written communication, without learning them, students won’t be able to reach these goals.
Outside the classroom, the goal isn’t to “get a good grade,” but the writing and conventions skills students learn will help them be more effective written communicators, a highly-valued skill in work and life.
[12 writing conventions to teach your students](id-conventions)
To help students become well-rounded writers, it’s important that they learn the conventions that affect how readers interact with and interpret their words. Teach and practice these skills during your writing activities to help students get familiar with the technical and language-specific tricks that help build better writers.
Mechanics
Mechanics are technical features the reader uses to orient themselves to text on the page. They influence how we expect to see words and sentences written in a particular language so they’re easy to understand.
Mechanics help make the reading process seamless and less distracting for readers. This helps them focus on understanding the meaning of a text rather than trying to comprehend the actual combination of letters and symbols on the page.
1. Spelling
Spelling is putting the correct letters in order to spell a particular word. Misspelled words distract readers. When they encounter a misspelling, readers spend more time figuring out what the word should be rather than understanding the meaning of the full sentence.
Beyond that, misspelled words may actually become different words and change the entire meaning of the sentence. For example, if you meant to use “lose” in a sentence and used “loose” instead, you would have sentences like these:
Correct: I didn’t want to lose my front tooth in gym class.
Misspelling: I didn’t want to loose my front tooth in gym class.
In the first sentence, the student likely already has a wiggly front tooth and doesn’t want it to fall out in gym class. In the second sentence, the student doesn’t have any wiggly teeth, and is hoping that doesn’t change in gym class—either because they’re not ready for it to happen yet, or because they don’t want an accident to happen.
2. Punctuation
Punctuation marks help guide readers through a piece of writing. They show readers where to stop and pause to control the pace and how to understand shared information. Like misspellings, missing punctuation can also change the meaning of a sentence. For example, missing commas in the following sentences change the meaning:
Without commas: I love drawing my friends and scary stories.
With commas: I love drawing, my friends, and scary stories.
In the first sentence, the student says they love drawing pictures of their friends and scary stories. In the second sentence, the student lists three things they love, including drawing, spending time with friends, and reading or listening to scary stories.
Teach students what common punctuation marks look like and how to use them to avoid these clarity mistakes. Some common punctuation marks students may use include:
Period: Finishes a complete thought or abbreviates words, like “Dr.” for “Doctor”
Comma: Separates list items or clauses in a sentence, or creates a pause for clarity
Question mark: Indicates curiosity at the end of a complete thought
Exclamation mark: Indicates excitement at the end of a complete thought
Apostrophe: Shows possession or takes the place of missing letters in a contraction like “they’re” for “they are”
Hyphen: Connects compound words or some words and their prefixes and suffixes, like “re-entry”
Quotation marks: Indicate exact words of a speaker who isn’t the author, or a character’s dialogue
Colon: Introduces lists or dialogue, gives emphasis to a word or phrase, or separates hours from minutes when writing time
Parenthesis: Adds additional, but nonessential information and details to a phrase or sentence
3. Capitalization
Capitalization helps readers identify proper nouns in a text, like names and locations. It also identifies the start of a new sentence or calls attention to important words in headings or titles. Different style guides for nonfiction and academic writing may have rules about when and how to use capitalization for different works. For example, in journalism, titles use capital letters on the first word and proper nouns.
4. Text chunking
Text chunking, or paragraphing, helps hold readers’ attention when ingesting information. Paragraphs, lists, and other ways of chunking text can reduce a reader’s cognitive load. Plus, it eliminates large walls of text on a page or screen that may be hard (or intimidating) to read.
5. Formatting
Formatting refers to how text looks on a page or screen. It includes things like font size and color, spacing, margins, page layout, and headings. Formatting and text chunking work together to make content easier to read and understand. Formatting also helps draw readers’ attention to specific elements in the text, like important quotes, statistics, or images.
6. Citations
Citations help authors credit sources in their work. In academic or research writing, especially, citing or referencing other sources is critical. If the author uses information that isn’t common knowledge—specifically anything that’s original or proprietary research—in their text and doesn’t cite their sources, that’s plagiarism.
Aside from including citations where appropriate, authors must also format them correctly. For example, when writing web content, authors usually hyperlink the original content source, which you’ll see a few times in this blog post.
Style guides like MLA, APA, and Chicago have their own citation rules, like footnotes, in-text citations, and bibliography or reference lists. Using quotes and quotation marks is also a form of citing sources because it attributes exact words and phrases to a speaker.
Usage
Usage conventions guide how an author uses language to communicate and convey meaning. Think of them as the next level up from mechanics. A perfectly spelled and formatted sentence without any meaning will still lose and confuse the audience. Usage conventions make sure that doesn’t happen.
7. Grammar
Grammar makes sentences make sense. It includes learning and correctly using the parts of speech to ensure your audience understands what you’re trying to say. Elements like subject-verb agreement and verb conjugations are just a few examples of grammar rules writers use to clarify their work.
8. Tone
Tone is how a piece of writing feels or comes off to an audience. The tone of a text can be happy, serious, sarcastic, formal, or friendly, among others. This may be one of the more difficult conventions for students to understand and master because it’s more abstract than others.
Word choice, the type of writing, genre, audience, and topic all influence what tone a writer should choose for any text. A mismatched tone and message can confuse the reader and dilute the message. It can also damage a writer’s credibility with their audience.
For example, if your principal wrote a note to the faculty saying your school was closing for three months due to a termite infestation, but used a lot of exclamation points and positive adjectives, the tone would feel off.
9. Audience awareness
Audience awareness is understanding who you’re writing for and how to meet their needs. Like tone, this convention may be tricky for students to understand. For many in-class writing assignments, the teacher or other students are the people who will read their work. Yet that may not actually be the target audience of their writing.
For example, if students write a news article about a Civil War battle that was supposed to appear in an 1863 Union-state newspaper, teachers and students from the 2020s shouldn’t be their target audience. It should be 1800s northerners instead.
There are a variety of considerations students can focus on to help them write to the correct audience, like:
Purpose: Why are you writing this piece and how will it serve your audience?
Interests: What does your audience care about—or why should they care about what you’re sharing?
Knowledge level: How familiar is your audience with the topic? How much background information do they need to understand it?
Tone: Is the topic serious or lighthearted? What type of delivery is the audience expecting?
Formatting: How does the audience expect to see the text? In print or digitally? With footnotes and a bibliography? With quotes or dialogue?
10. Style
An author’s writing style is their textual fingerprint or unique voice that’s easily recognizable in everything they write. It includes word choice, diction, sentence structure, and tone.
Students learning to write and practicing writing, especially in the younger grades, often don’t have their own writing style yet. This develops over time as they begin to master conventions, understand different genres and types of writing, and, most importantly, practice writing frequently.
Students practicing writing and trying to find their own style may mimic other writers’ styles. This type of scaffold can help them understand what writing style elements feel most authentic to them and which ones they want to continue using in the future.
11. Clarity
One of the main goals of any type of piece of writing is to convey a message. You want your readers to make meaning out of the text you share. Unclear writing doesn’t meet that goal. To help students improve clarity in their writing, offer tips like:
Writing short, direct sentences.
Giving the right amount of background information.
Adding charts, graphs, and other visuals where helpful and appropriate.
Following all other types of conventions already mentioned.
12. Consistency
Consistency can mean many things in writing, for both mechanics and usage, like:
Keeping the same tense throughout a text.
Keeping the same point of view throughout a text.
Following the same style rules throughout the entire piece.
Using one citation style or method.
Using the same tone throughout a text.
Consistency is a key convention in writing because it eliminates distractions and keeps the reader on track. No matter what style guide or conventions rules they’re following, students should always aim to keep them consistent throughout the entire piece they’re writing.
[Tips to teach writing conventions at any grade level](id-tips)
Need ideas on the best ways to get your students learning and practicing writing conventions? Check out these tips for every grade band:
Early elementary (Grades K-2)
Students in this age group are still learning the basics of reading and writing. Yet, you can still introduce them to writing conventions in age-appropriate ways.
Teach punctuation usage
Show your youngest students the meaning of punctuation. When reading together as a class point out end-of-sentence punctuation—like periods, exclamation marks, and question marks—and what they mean. As students begin to learn that complete sentences end with a punctuation mark, they can start to choose which ones make the most sense to add to the end of the ones they create.
Introduce students to text structures
Teach students about text structures when reading books, stories, and texts in class. When students learn how authors organize a text before they even start practicing writing for themselves, they can see how things like text chunking and formatting affect how the reader experiences a story. Get resources to help you teach students this topic with our Analyzing Text Structure text set.
Practice reading and writing together
Students can practice reading and writing together to better understand the relationship between the two. Rather than just practicing sight words orally, create writing activities with them too. You may also talk about the punctuation in the in-class texts you read, or have students write one-sentence responses to questions about the texts they read.
Upper elementary (Grades 3-5)
This grade band has the foundations of reading and writing and they’re transitioning from “learning to read and write” to “reading and writing to learn.” Use these strategies to help them dive deeper into the world of conventions and expand their skills.
Do dictation work
Have students practice the patterns they learn as readers in their writing. Teach morphemes and Latin and Greek roots to help with spelling patterns. You may give spelling tests to help them practice words that use these parts of language or learn to spell vocabulary words from other in-class lessons.
For example, around the holidays, you may use our ELA in the Real World: How Do You Spell Hanukkah? text set to teach about the various celebrations people have at the end of the year. You can add a spelling test to the end of the lesson and ask students to spell words like “Hanukkah,” “Chanukah,” and “latkes” to reinforce vocabulary and conventions.
Teach conventions in world language classes
Conventions, especially mechanics, can vary by language. As your students begin or continue their world language classes, teach them the conventions of the new languages they’re learning. You can compare and contrast how these conventions differ from the same rules in their first language.
This group has a good grasp on writing fundamentals and is starting to expand their writing practice across subjects and disciplines more intentionally. Use these tips to help enforce mechanics conventions and transition to a greater focus on usage conventions.
Weave grammar practice into lessons
Students learn best when they have context about how the lesson material affects them and their lives. Standalone grammar lessons may not be as effective at making the information stick if students don’t know why they should care.
For example, teaching a standalone lesson on adjectives and adverbs may lack context of how and why students should use these parts of speech. But discussing them while reading Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and learning about descriptive writing may clarify the connection.
Encourage peer editing sessions
Have students edit each other’s work to give them conventions practice. This exercise helps them look for and fix spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, formatting, and citation errors, among other conventions mistakes. It also allows students to learn from each other and interact with other authors’ writing styles.
As students advance in school and then into their careers, their writing focuses primarily on informational, nonfiction, and discipline-specific types of writing. These types and genres of writing are important, and learning the conventions for them matters, but these aren’t the only kinds of writing that exist.
Give your students opportunities for creative writing in areas like fiction, poetry, descriptive writing, and other types and genres to practice a variety of conventions, especially usage conventions. Try it out with our Writing Connections: Writing Narratives text set.
High school (Grades 9-12)
High schoolers do the longest and most specialized writing of all the grade bands. Use these tips to help students polish their writing skills and reinforce the rules of conventions.
Assign relevant, real-world writing practice
High school students spend four years deciding what comes next for them in education and career. Assigning relevant, real-world writing practice focused on the disciplines and current events can help them practice writing conventions in different subjects they’ll use in higher education and the workforce.
For example, during election season, you can assign a Newsela Writing activity called “Hamilton’s Support for the Electoral College.” This short-form argumentative writing assignment helps students examine what the Electoral College is and differing viewpoints on its creation and purpose.
Encourage students to practice self-editing
While middle school is a great time to practice peer editing, high school can be a great time to teach students how to do self-editing. This is an important skill for all students, especially those who want to enter a text-heavy field like journalism or research.
Self-editing can help students recognize their weaknesses with certain conventions and become more familiar with fixing their writing before sending it off for “publication” (or to get a grade!).
Refer to other strategies as needed
Many strategies listed for other grade bands don’t stop when students move to the next phase of their schooling. Things like peer editing, teaching conventions in world language classes, and offering opportunities for varied writing practice still apply to high school students. You know your students best, so add these types of activities to your lessons to boost conventions practice when necessary.
[Frequently asked questions about writing conventions](id-faq)
Want to know more about the ins and outs of writing conventions? Check out the answers to some of these frequently asked questions on the topic:
Is it ever okay for students to break traditional writing conventions?
Yes, there are some cases where it’s acceptable, even encouraged, for students to break writing conventions. Creative writing projects are just one example. Most of these activities aren’t about writing “perfectly,” but are an outlet for self-expression.
To quote Pablo Picasso, though, students should “learn the rules like a pro, so [they] can break them like an artist.” Students should first learn writing conventions and rules to learn how, when, and where to break those conventions for maximum impact on their audience and when delivering their message.
Are writing conventions the same in all languages?
While the categories of writing conventions typically apply to all languages, some more nuanced rules may differ. Spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar are some of the most common conventions to change across languages.
For example, English writers use a single exclamation point at the end of a phrase or sentence to show excitement. Spanish writers may use an upside down exclamation mark (signo de exclamación) at the beginning and a right-side-up one at the end of a phrase or sentence to indicate excitement.
This fact is important to remember when teaching ELLs, especially if they’ve already learned to write in their first language.
Do different writing types have their own set of writing conventions?
Yes, different writing types can have different conventional rules. Things like capitalization, text chunking, formatting, citations, audience awareness, and tone may change across writing types.
For example, the formatting of a creative writing poem is different from that of a technical instruction manual. The text chunking in a poem often groups a certain number of lines into stanzas, while an instruction manual may group steps together in a numbered list.
Do different genres have their own set of writing conventions?
Yes, different genres may have slightly different conventions, especially usage conventions. Tone, audience, awareness, consistency, formatting, and citations are common conventions that change across genres.
For example, the tone of a fictional picture book about the first day of spring would be friendly and welcoming, while a technical report on climate change would be serious and straightforward.
Do different subjects or disciplines have their own set of writing conventions?
Yes, different subjects and disciplines can have their own set of writing conventions. Formatting and citations are the biggest things that may change across disciplines. For example, English, art, and philosophy use MLA formatting and citations, while social and health science, business, and education use APA.
Journalism uses AP style, which are writing guidelines from the Associated Press and provide standards for punctuation, spelling, and grammar for news publications. Beyond that, different companies and organizations may also have style guides that pull from traditional formatting conventions and guidelines but adjust them to fit their company and audience’s needs for clarity and consistency.
[Nurture confident writers with Newsela Writing](id-newsela)
Newsela Writing is your writing assistant that helps students in grades 4-12 become confident writers. It gives immediate, rubric-aligned feedback and provides a continuous feedback loop that saves teachers time and increases student writing frequency and quality.
Newsela Writing can help students practice most of these 12 conventions in any classroom. The “Conventions” rubric meter on each assignment gives students glows and grows, telling them where they excel in using mechanics conventions in their writing and how they can improve. The “Organization” meter provides guidance on usage conventions like clarity and consistency.
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