Teaching young people to write is a job and a joy. For over twenty years I taught language arts to sixth and seventh grade students. Language arts includes reading, writing, speaking, listening, presenting and viewing. Writing was the biggest challenge.

Writing is a process that ends with a finished product. There are really only three things a writer can do to make that finished product as good as it can possibly be. Writers can add to their text, remove something from their text, or move material around. Most of my students had no problem with adding or deleting material. The real difficulty was rearranging material. This was not just happening with a particular class, but was a general trend with the beginning writers. It's important to get the information in print, but then the organization of material has to happen and it wasn't.

The challenge of organization was as much a challenge to me, the reader, as it was to my students, the writers. I often thought where do I begin to help them sort out their material. Students included a lot of information in their writing but the thought process often skipped all over the place. Their papers frequently became randomly selected lists of things rather than a logical grouping of information. Helping students move information around to make their writing coherent and logical was a daunting task. Then I got an inspiration that helped me and helped my students help themselves.

Research papers presented the biggest challenge for organization. I usually assigned the same research topic for all the students so we could work together in the preliminary stages that mostly involved subdividing the topic. For example, a favorite research topic was wolves and together as a whole class we divided the topic into subtopics. So the broad subject, wolves, was broken down into physical description, social behavior, communication, and endangered status.

This is where my inspiration entered. I had students color code the subtopics. Physical description was blue, social behavior green, communication red, and endangered status yellow. As students read from a source, they took notes, and as they took notes they underlined each subtopic in its assigned color. So when they read about social behavior, they underlined those notes in green. A minimum of three sources was required, and as they went on to the next source they continued to color code the subtopics. When it was time to write their research papers students collected all of their green notes and bundled them together, and wrote about social behavior. They followed the same process for each subtopic and thanks to color coding their notes, their papers were fairly well organized.

Color coding is by no means a new concept, but there are many ways to use it, and this turned out to be of great value for the emerging writers. It worked well for fiction as well as nonfiction.

I said initially that teaching students to write is a job and a joy. It's a job because it involves reading every word each student writes and a joy because it is rewarding to watch emerging writers succeed and take pride in their work. Color coding the subtopics certainly added to the joy.