How to Teach Writing Fluency

Tim Shanahan

This blog first posted on January 8, 2022, and was re-issued on May 3, 2025. These days there is much interest in reading fluency, but writing fluency has an important role to play in literacy development, too. As I predicted in this piece, new research would eventually demonstrate that writing quality depends greatly on writing fluency (Kim, 2024). In fact, without writing fluency, you are not likely to see much good writing. If students cannot effortlessly get their words onto paper, they will struggle to write well. This blog provides several practical recommendations for making this happen and it cites some of that newer research on these issues.

Teacher question: What can you tell me about writing fluency in grades K-5? Our district is making a major effort to improve writing which is great, but our kids don’t write much. I don’t mean that the teachers don’t give writing assignments (they do), but the writing that the kids produce is very limited and it takes them a long time. I can’t see how we can improve their writing if they can’t write more.

Shanahan response:

Writing fluency is a slippery fish. Definitions of the term vary greatly within the profession (Latif, 2013). Not surprisingly, those differences in definition result in a wide variety of advice for teachers on how to facilitate fluent writing. Accordingly, researchers interested in the matter have spent most of their efforts towards figuring out what fluency is or its relation to writing quality.

I’m with you about the importance of the amount of writing, though research is not very supportive of the idea that increasing amount of writing improves fluency (Skar, et al., 2024). Basically, the research suggests there are other more important impediments to success in this area. My advice: get kids writing more often but don’t just increase the dosage.)

Personally, I’m happy that anyone is paying attention to this at all. For a long time, the literature on children’s writing seemed to emphasize quality over fluency. This was done by promoting revision heavily, even in the primary grades. Revision is important, of course, but it only helps if you have gotten your ideas onto paper in the first place. Revising a blank page is an empty exercise.

National and state assessments don’t consider fluency issues directly either. They might get at it incidentally by marking a paper down if its ideas aren’t sufficiently developed. However, lack of development can be as evident in papers with lots of words as in those with few. Although the tests don’t directly measure fluency, I suspect that most readers have trouble crediting a paper that isn’t “sufficiently” long – whatever that may mean to the evaluators.

I’ve long believed that writing fluency – as much as writing quality – should be a major goal in the early grades (my first publication in the field was about how I had successfully facilitated writing fluency in my classrooms – Shanahan, 1977).

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