Elementary school writing skills focus on the basic how-tos of writing sentences and paragraphs. When students reach middle school, they know how to write, but often lack the strategies needed to write well, such as making use of the writing process. Students must work hard to strengthen their abilities to gather information and plan an outline, revise their writing for clarity, organization and factual correctness and edit for grammar and usage mistakes.
Out of habit, middle school writers tend to continue using the short, choppy sentences of elementary school when asked to compose a middle-level writing piece. This writing weakness has students creating paragraphs that are only one or two lines long, when the mature writing of high school requires variety. Varying sentence structure is a standard in middle school writing, so students need to develop their writing skills by combining sentences.
The trick to writing a good paragraph and a good essay is well-developed content. If a writing introduces an idea, but never explains it, that essay really has no purpose. Content is made up of the details and discussions of the main topic. Using details to thoroughly explain is important to good writing. Middle school students can easily write a paragraph describing their favorite shirt, but that writing is likely to mention the color and type of shirt only. Middle school writers must be guided through the process of adding details to make their writing as clear and full as possible.
Middle school students struggle greatly with writing summaries, brief restatements of a piece of writing. To summarize, the writer has to read and comprehend a passage and then formulate its meaning into different words. Students must be strong readers in order to summarize well. To overcome this weakness, middle school students should practice comprehension skills by reading brief passages or news articles, answering basic recall questions and then working with the teacher to create a summary. This practice will give students more confidence to successfully summarize longer pieces on their own.