What's the Main Idea Here?

In Shelly Stagg Peterson's book, Writing Across the Curriculum: Because All Teachers Teach Writing, she stresses the importance of teaching writing in the subjects we may consider "content areas" -- such as math, science, social studies, geography, etc.

In her words, the "book is based on the view that writing is a process that helps learners think more deeply about ideas and information they encounter while reading, listening, viewing, and moving throughout their worlds" (p. 3).

Essentially, the main idea of this text is that writing into content areas does two things:

1. helps reinforce the concepts taught
2. helps improve students' writing abilities (p. 4)

Peterson suggests that students find the idea of writing in science, social studies, health, etc. very appealing. Students get excited about using literary forms such as cartoons, letters, persuasive letters, poetry, etc. in content areas that they aren't generally used in (p. 18).

She suggests that writing in content subjects can be done in 2 ways:

1. Giving parameters about the topic (ie: motion -- you must cover at least 2 concepts learned), and leave the genre writing form wide open. OR
2. Place limitations on the genre or the writing form (this may have students go beyond forms they are most comfortable with), but allow for a wide range of topics that fit within the content area being taught (ie: anything we've learned in Social Studies thus far) (p. 16).