The K-12 Education Office will partner with the Institute for Excellence in Writing to create a new structure and style curriculum, based on Hillsdale’s K-12 Program Guide, for third through eighth graders. The first set, designed for third graders, will be available in summer 2023.

“We are excited to partner with the Institute for Excellence in Writing to provide the students at Hillsdale-affiliated schools with a comprehensive writing curriculum that is both rigorous and engaging,” Assistant Provost for K-12 Education Kathleen O’Toole said in a press release. 

The curriculum will teach students to write using “brevity, clarity, and creativity,” according to a press release. 

According to the IEW website, students using the existing IEW curriculum will learn nine ways to formattheir compositions, as well as stylistic techniques to improve their writing. 

Hillsdale Academy literature teacher Ellen Condict said good K-12 writing curriculums center on skill-building.

“A writing curriculum for K-12 needs to concern itself with careful scaffolding of skills, building the students up at each level without trying to rush them through the thought process and stages of development that all writers reach at their own pace,” Condict said. “A good curriculum will offer students many opportunities for repetition and mastery of particular skills instead of leaving them to rely on innate ability.”

The existing IEW curriculum is already used in some classical schools and homeschools, and teaches students to write by slowly building on skills learned in previous lessons and previous years. Students learn how to enhance their writing by adding “dress-ups,” such as the who-which clause and strong verbs, according to the IEW Structure and Style Overview. Students also learn basic organization and formatting, which allows them to keep their thoughts consistent throughout their pieces.

“IEW does a wonderful job of making concrete the stylistic moves that gifted writers grasp intuitively; making connections and bridges between ideas doesn’t come automatically to most young writers, and the IEW curriculum gives them tools to work towards real proficiency with language and rhetoric,” Condict said. “It gives students small, clear areas to work on instead of vaguely assuming that they can improve their writing by learning general principles alone.”

Anyone interested in using the new curriculum will be able to access it through IEW.