At a Glance
- Many articulate children produce written work that looks nothing like what comes out of their mouths
- Speaking and writing use different brain processes — writing demands several skills at the same time
- Handwriting and spelling alone can consume most of a child’s working memory, leaving little room for ideas
- Children who have less hands-on physical play may develop fine motor control more slowly — this can add to the writing load
- Separating thinking from mechanics — through dictation or staged writing — can make a real difference
- The ideas are not the problem — the pipeline from brain to page is the bottleneck
When Speaking and Writing Don’t Match
A child comes home and talks about their day with a clear beginning, middle, and end. When something interests them, they explain it in detail and with confidence.
Then comes the writing homework. A few words. Shaky handwriting. A sentence that trails off.
It can look like two completely different children — but the gap between speaking and writing is one of the most common and most misunderstood struggles in primary school.
The Most Common Misunderstanding
Teachers sometimes conclude the child isn’t trying hard enough, or needs more practice. But more practice often doesn’t help, because the problem isn’t effort or ideas.
Speaking and writing are fundamentally different tasks as far as the brain is concerned. Treating them as versions of the same thing leads to interventions that don’t address what’s actually happening.
“Every child learns to talk without formal instruction. No child learns to write that way. Writing is a technology that has to be explicitly taught — and it’s far more demanding than it looks.”
Speaking Comes Naturally. Writing Does Not.
Every typically developing child learns to talk without being taught. They absorb language from people around them and by age three or four, they construct sentences and tell stories. Nobody teaches toddlers grammar rules.
Writing is the opposite. No child picks it up by being surrounded by text. It must be explicitly taught and practised over years.
What Happens When a Child Writes
When a child tries to write, they must manage several things at once: holding the idea in working memory, choosing words, spelling each one, physically forming letters, staying on the line, and keeping track of what comes next.
That is not one task. It is six or seven tasks competing for the same limited pool of mental energy.
The Real Problem: Working Memory
Researchers use a framework called the Simple View of Writing to explain how written composition works. It identifies three components: transcription (handwriting and spelling), text generation (ideas and sentences), and executive function (planning and organising).
All three compete for the child’s limited working memory. For young or struggling writers, transcription alone — just the handwriting and spelling — can use up most of it.
When the hand is working hard to form letters and the brain is working hard to spell words, there is little cognitive space left for generating ideas.
What Research Shows
A study by Bourdin and Fayol asked children to recall word lists both out loud and in writing. Children consistently performed worse in writing — not because they couldn’t remember the words, but because writing used up more mental capacity. Adults, whose handwriting is automatic, showed no such difference.
Throughout primary school, writing remains more mentally demanding than speech.
Why This Matters
When a child tells a good story but produces three flat sentences on paper, the mechanics of writing are consuming the working memory that would otherwise go toward ideas.
The ideas are still there. But the mechanics are clogging the pipeline.
This is not laziness or low ability. It is a resource allocation problem.
A Contributing Factor: The Hands
Forming letters requires fine motor control that develops through physical play — climbing, gripping, digging, cutting, squeezing. Children who have less of this kind of activity may find letter formation more effortful, which adds to the cognitive load of writing.
When forming letters is physically tiring, even less working memory is available for composing.
“If a child can dictate a well-structured story but cannot write one, the problem is not the ideas. The problem is transcription — and that is solvable.”
When Dictation Helps
For children where transcription is the main bottleneck, dictation can be a useful window. When the burden of handwriting and spelling is removed, the quality of ideas and sentence structure often improves noticeably — working memory is freed up for content rather than mechanics.
It’s worth noting that dictation doesn’t help every child equally. Some children find speaking aloud while composing just as difficult as writing. If dictation helps, it’s a good indicator that transcription is the issue. If it doesn’t, the bottleneck may lie elsewhere.
How Schools Often Make It Worse
Many schools ask children to compose original text before the mechanics of writing are automatic. A child still concentrating on how to form the letter b is simultaneously expected to produce creative, structured paragraphs.
It’s like asking someone to compose a song while still figuring out where the notes are on the piano.
The Expectation Gap
The curriculum expects composition before transcription skills can support it. The child struggles, produces poor work, and the conclusion drawn is that the problem is effort or ideas. Interventions focus on writing more — which only increases the load on a system already stretched.
The child learns, through repeated experience, that writing is something they are bad at. That belief is hard to undo.
What Actually Helps
The most practical step is to stop asking the child to think and transcribe at the same time.
Separate Thinking From Writing
Letting a child dictate stories while an adult writes or types removes the transcription burden entirely. Talking through ideas first, then working on writing them down after the composing is done, separates the two demands.
Build Mechanics Separately
Short, regular handwriting sessions build automaticity that eventually frees working memory for composition. Structured spelling practice builds word knowledge. These matter — but as separate, focused activities, not folded into creative writing tasks.
Stage the Writing Process
Instead of “write a story,” the task can be broken into stages: talk about the story first, dictate while an adult writes, then work together turning parts into the child’s own handwriting. Each stage removes one layer of demand.
“The pipeline from brain to page is the bottleneck — and bottlenecks can be fixed.”
One More Thing
The mechanical struggle with writing shouldn’t become the defining story of how a child sees themselves as a thinker. The ideas are real. The stories told out loud are evidence of that.
Having an adult write down what a child says is not a shortcut. It’s one of the oldest strategies in early literacy — and research suggests that children who practise dictation regularly develop stronger fluency in both speaking and writing over time.
The mechanics will catch up. The goal in the meantime is to make sure the ideas keep flowing.
Is your child struggling to get their ideas on paper? Firefly Ed offers practical strategies and research-based guidance to help parents support their young writers.
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