Learning Center
Writing
Emphasize the “trump” traits
January 7, 2019
While all six traits are ingredients to strong writing, they are not equally important when it comes to planning mini-lesson instruction. Writing teachers should not spend equal time teaching each trait throughout the curriculum.
To be clear—voice, word choice, and sentence fluency are valuable. They add sophistication and style to the writing. However, the traits of ideas, organization, and conventions are essential to glean the core and substance of the message.
For example, improving the word choice is less important when the piece is lacking information (i.e., ideas). Adding more voice can be a back-burner issue if the organization and flow are hard to follow. Similarly, creating sentence variety is not necessary if a reader can’t determine the words written because the spelling is so off (i.e., conventions).
The traits of ideas, organization, and conventions play a bigger role in the overall impact of the message. Therefore, they are often referred to as the “trump” traits. Similar to a card game where the trump suit outranks the other cards, the importance of these three traits in writing outranks the overall weight of voice, word choice, and sentence fluency.
Embracing this concept will help teachers prioritize what to target when planning mini-lesson instruction. If there are many writer weaknesses, focus on those that will dramatically improve the writing first. And those always fall under the traits of ideas, organization, and conventions.