Writing to Boost Reading Comprehension

When we think about the Science of Reading, writing doesn’t always come to mind first. But the truth is, writing plays a powerful role in strengthening students’ comprehension—especially when aligned to the same levels we address in Scarborough’s Reading Rope: word recognition and language comprehension.

Scarborough’s Reading Rope reminds us that reading comprehension is a multi-strand and hugely complex activity. Comprehension is built from vocabulary, syntax, background knowledge, and more. But to truly internalize all that, students NEED to write.

Writing reinforces reading. It makes vocabulary stick, builds sentence fluency, and helps students process ideas deeply.

So whether you’re teaching a novel, article, or poem, here are simple, low-prep writing tasks you can weave into your reading instruction at four different levels:

Word Level Writing Tasks

Writing at the word level helps students internalize morphology, vocabulary, and spelling patterns.

Try These:

Word Map Writing: Students choose 3-4 words and figure out the part of speech. Ask them to use it in a sentence, find a synonym or antonym, and write a definition in their own words.
- Bonus: Ask them to illustrate one word or create a metaphor that includes it.
Context Clues Writing: Give students a sentence with a target word missing. Their task would be to figure out what word would fit and then write another full sentence using clues to show the word’s meaning.
Syllable Snap: After syllabication practice of words from the text, task students with writing a funny short story using as many of the multisyllabic words correctly.
- Scaffold it: Provide sentence starters or a theme like “write about something that happened in the cafeteria yesterday.”
Vocabulary Sorting + Writing: Students sort words from the text by tone, topic, or connotation, then choose 2–3 to use in a short paragraph.
- Bonus: Ask students to explain, in writing, why they chose those words and how the connotation helps them understand the meaning.

Many of these are very similar to the word knowledge activities that I wrote about here.

Sentence Level Writing Tasks

Sentence-level writing builds syntactic awareness and fluency which is SOOOOO necessary for comprehension as texts become more and more complex at higher levels. These tasks focus on grammar and syntax related to the text that you are reading.

Try These:

Mentor Sentence Mimicry: Choose a sentence from your reading that includes a concept like appositive phrases, compound structure, or some other grade appropriate grammar concept. Have students write a completely new sentence modeled after that mentor sentence.
Fix-It Rewrites: Give a grammatically incorrect sentence about the text and have students rewrite it using correct punctuation or structure.
- Bonus: Have students write their own grammatically incorrect sentence for a partner to fix.
Sentence Combining: Provide short choppy sentences related to the ideas in the text or from the text itself–three sentences works great. Ask students to combine them using conjunctions or clauses.

Paragraph Level Writing Tasks

At this level, students start to connect ideas with appropriate transitions, cohesion and clarity. This is where students really start to grasp text structures as well.

Try These:

Transition Challenge: Give students a topic, something related to your reading, and a list of 5 transition words (however, for example, as a result, meanwhile, therefore). Task them with writing a paragraph about the topic using all 5 transitions.
Text Structure Writing: Identify the structure of a paragraph then have students write a new paragraph on a related topic using the same structure.
- Bonus: Have students write an entire essay using a different text structure in each paragraph. You can even provide the outline to them!
Pronoun Puzzle: Pick a paragraph from your reading and have students replace all of the pronouns with their antecedent nouns. Finally, ask students to compare the “revised” version to the original to see how it affects readability.

Text Level Writing Tasks

These tasks encourage students to engage deeply with theme, structure, and meaning. Students will be able to synthesize big ideas like character development and author’s purpose.

Try These:

Point of View Rewrite: You or your students choose a key scene from the story to retell from a different character’s perspective.
- Extension: Require inclusion of a direct quote and internal thoughts that match the new POV.
Compare & Contrast Paragraph: After reading a paired text, ask students to write a paragraph or more comparing something: tone, theme, or author’s perspective, character traits, etc.
- Scaffold: Don’t forget to provide a graphic organizer to gather their thoughts.
Theme Journal Entry: Students write a journal entry–either from their perspective or as if they’re the main character, reflecting on the events and theme of the story.
- Scaffold: help them structure their writing as an argument or CER statement. Provide sentence frames for each part of CER.

Writing and Reading go hand in hand. Two things I will never understand are (1) the fact that we have to teach everything in classes that could be as short as 47 minutes a day and (2) that some schools split reading and writing into two different classes with different teachers. In an ideal world, we would have double time but integrate both reading and writing TOGETHER! So much of reading comprehension is built on and around writing.

I hope that some of these activities can help you integrate them together in your own class. And let me know in the comments how you find time for both.

Mrs. McManus ELA