Fluency is one of the three pillars of writing – code, comprehensibility, and fluency.
Code. English, and all languages are a code, a printed representation of language.
English rules of code include left to right, top to bottom, spaces between the words, punctuation, subject/verb/object, etc. We spend a lot of time teaching code.
It’s about 80% of language arts in primary grades, but still about 3% in senior English. Grade 12’s can still struggle with there/they’re/their, the difference between a colon and a semi-colon, and lots more.
Some language codes read right to left, some start at what we think of as the “back” of the book, some are symbolic rather than phonemic. Learning the code is the ticket to the future in any country in the world.
Comprehensibility. We can write so that others can understand us.
And… writing in the conventions of form. We can write a letter, a report, a description, an argument, a recipe, a set of instructions, a news article – over 30 possible forms. People picking up our writing should be able to “instantly” recognize (comprehend) the form in which we are writing.
Fluency.To top it all off, we should be able to do this quickly.
But fluency is something we typically expect to appear just by itself. Extreme Writing allows for improvement in fluency (and ideation – the ability to get an idea quickly and use it.)
