A student approaches you with a draft of writing in hand. She knows what to say, the answer she thinks you want to hear. I read it over. In 1978 Don Graves asserted that all children can write on the first day of school. After conducting research in Mary Ellen Giaccobbe's classroom in Atkinson, New Hampshire, he showed that first graders can write once they know as few as eight letters.
All children can write.
We believe that they can. But in some classrooms, teachers have been dismayed by the lack of improvement in their students' writing. They have waited in vain for kids to absorb the qualities of good writing, to pick them through more and more writing. Having students write on a regular basis is a prerequisite for getting better writing, but you need more than quantity to get better quality in the writing. We think that rereading is a crucial, and often unmentioned, part of this process.