We Don’t Write Like That: A GLP Guide to Writing on Our Terms

A Practical and Poetic Guide to Honouring the GLP Writing Process

A GLP guide to writing on our terms—moving from gestalt to echo to resonance to container. Not a lesser path, but ours. For teachers, parents, and GLPs themselves, with practical adaptations to honour rhythm, meaning, and voice.

Introduction

I’ve been writing about GLPs for a long time here—quietly at first, then more insistently as the patterns became too clear to ignore—but something shifted with the last few pieces. We Made Language Anyway, Stage 6 and Then What?, The Literacy Divide, Refusing the Elevator Pitch… each of them, in their own way, found a current and carried farther than I expected. My inbox filled with questions—not just about theory, or the politics of how we’re erased from the models that claim to describe all humans, but about what comes next. How do we actually teach writing to GLPs? How do we translate the knowing we have—the scripts, the cadences, the long-held gestalts—into something legible without sanding off their shape? The questions kept circling back to the same gap: there’s nothing out there for us, not really, unless you count the rare SLP who’s both GLP-aware and willing to step beyond their clinical lane.

And here’s the thing—I have enormous respect for the people who’ve held that torch. Marge Blanc’s big brown Natural Language Acquisition book remains, for many, the first time they’ve felt our way of speaking dignified in print. But that book is written for speech therapists, not writing teachers or homeschooling parents. It was never meant to be a guide for how to coax a written voice from the shimmer of a remembered phrase, or how to help a Stage 5/6 GLP turn resonance into something the exam board will recognise without killing its rhythm. That’s not a flaw—it’s just not its remit.

When I was writing Holistic Language Instruction and Decolonising Language Education, I tried to thread some of that missing practice into the text—lesson plans, stage-aware approaches, examples from my own classrooms. My editor at the time, and the publisher, were polite but firm: the teachers will know how to implement your guidance. Strip out the plans. Leave the theory. Save trees. I did, reluctantly. But the truth is… they don’t always know. Not because they lack skill or care, but because they were never trained to teach literacy in ways that fit a GLP mind. They’ve been given phonics scripts and analytic progressions and told it’s science—told it’s universal—so when a GLP sits in front of them with a head full of language that refuses to break into neat little parts, they’re left guessing.

And now, after those last articles, I find myself with an inbox that feels almost like a collective inhale—people saying this is revolutionary, that they’ve never seen their experience reflected, that they finally understand why writing felt impossible for them or their child. So here it is, the thing I was told no one needed: the writing guide. Not a new orthodoxy, not a universal template, but a map we can follow from the way we already speak to the way we might write—on our terms, in our time, in our own key.

Why the Analytic Model Fails Us

Traditional writing instruction likes its steps clean and sequential—sentence, paragraph, essay, in that neat and supposedly inevitable order. Each stage has to be polished before you’re allowed to move on, as though the act of writing were a factory line rather than an act of meaning-making. The whole system is built on the idea that language begins as small, manageable units and can be assembled like bricks in a wall. But many of us—GLP or otherwise—don’t start with bricks. We begin with the whole building, or the sensation of stepping inside it for the first time. We start with language as a landscape: a scene already alive, a remembered phrase already complete, a rhythm already carrying its own internal architecture. For us, meaning arrives before grammar, and rhythm before structure.

When you try to force that into the narrow funnel of a topic sentence, or into the tidy boxes of a graphic organiser, you don’t just slow the process—you fracture it. I can tell the GLPs in my classes without ever seeing a diagnosis, often without them having one at all. Not every student I recognise this way has an IEP. But give them a conventional writing task and the strain becomes visible almost immediately.

It’s not that they lack ideas. They’re brimming with them—full to the point of overflow. The challenge isn’t generating content; it’s that the gallon of story, image, feeling, fact they’re carrying won’t fit into the pint glass they’ve been handed. They try to pour it in anyway, because that’s the tool they’ve been told is necessary, and it spills everywhere. Details scatter into the margins. Arrows sprout between boxes, looping back on themselves. A half-filled cell here, a crossed-out sentence there. The organiser starts to look less like a plan and more like a battlefield—a map of the mind’s refusal to be cut into equal pieces.

And this is the point where the damage begins. Teachers trained to see the organiser as the proof of “planning” will look at that mess and assume the student doesn’t know how to organise their thoughts. The student, in turn, starts to absorb that judgement. They begin to feel the mismatch not as a flaw in the tool, but as a flaw in themselves. The tension builds—each writing task becomes another round of trying to shrink something living into a form that was never designed for it.

Over time, that tension calcifies into avoidance. The joy of language gets buried under the dread of the container. And the student who was once carrying whole worlds in their head starts to believe a smaller, harsher truth: I can’t write. But the truth was never that they couldn’t write. The truth was that the container was wrong. The pint glass was too small for the gallon they’d been given. And maybe the work—the real work—isn’t teaching them to pour more neatly. It’s building a vessel big enough to hold what they already have.

The GLP Writing Sequence: Gestalt > Echo > Resonance > Container

Gestalt: Capture the Whole

When something comes to me, it rarely arrives as a single, clean word—never mind a tidy sentence. It comes as a whole scene, or the echo of a moment so vivid I can almost smell it. A remembered phrase overheard in a shop queue, a line from a film that hooked into my ribs twenty years ago and never let go, the exact rise and fall of a friend’s voice when they said something that mattered. It’s not just language—it’s the room, the light, the sound under the words.

This is where it starts for me: the gestalt. The whole. The intact package of meaning, emotion, rhythm, and context. I don’t pick it apart yet. I don’t try to wrestle it into proper syntax or pull it into a neat little note card. I catch it exactly as it is, because the moment I start dismantling it, I risk losing the life inside it. Sometimes that means I mutter it into my phone whilst walking down the street, knowing I’ll get strange looks. Sometimes I scribble it on a receipt, even if the ink smears in the rain. Sometimes it’s a voice memo made in the dark when my mind is supposed to be sleeping.

The completeness here isn’t about grammar or structure—it’s about integrity. If it arrives as a fragment, it’s still whole to me. If it’s three sentences long, I’ll keep all three. And I trust that there’s a reason this particular piece of language has surfaced now, even if I don’t know what it is yet.

Echo: Living With the Line

Once I have the gestalt, I live with it. I carry it around like a pebble in my pocket, feeling its edges over and over until I know them by heart. This is echo—repetition, yes, but not the rote, mechanical kind. It’s a kind of intimate rehearsal. I’ll say it out loud whilst making tea, hearing how it lands in my mouth. I’ll write it in the corner of a page just to see how it looks there. I’ll try it in a different mood—soft and tender one day, sharp and ironic the next.

For most people watching, this is where they think I’m stuck. Circling the same bit of language instead of “moving on” to the next thing. But for me, the echo stage isn’t about moving forward yet—it’s about deepening. It’s like a musician running the same riff again and again, not to perfect it in some abstract sense, but to feel where it wants to go next.

Sometimes the echo changes shape immediately. Other times it sits, untouched, for days or weeks before shifting. And every now and then, I’ll realise there’s another line—another gestalt—that needs to be in the room with it. I’ll bring them together and see how they play off each other. This is why I can’t separate my writing process into clean, linear stages—everything loops, overlaps, and folds back in on itself.

Resonance: Finding the Why

There’s a moment, often sudden and unexpected, when the echo begins to hum differently. Something in me clicks, and I realise why this line has been staying with me. That’s the beginning of resonance.

Sometimes it’s a direct memory: the line sounds like my grandmother’s voice, or it carries the same emotional tone as a conversation I had when I was seventeen. Other times, it’s more abstract—something about the rhythm reminds me of a place, a season, a version of myself I’d almost forgotten.

In this stage, I might freewrite around the line, letting associations spill onto the page without worrying about order or logic. I might draw connections—literal ones, in the form of mind maps, or more sensory ones, like matching the line to a piece of music or an image. The work here isn’t about clarity; it’s about depth. I’m asking: what’s inside this? What other shapes, feelings, and memories does it contain?

And here’s where the recursion kicks in again. Sometimes, resonance sends me back to echo because I’ve uncovered a layer that needs more living-with before I can move on. Other times, it sends me all the way back to gestalt, because the original scene has shifted in my mind and I need to capture it again, fresh. The process is not a straight road—it’s a spiral staircase, and I often circle the same landing more than once before continuing.

Container: Giving It a Home

Only after I’ve carried the gestalt, lived with it in echo, and explored its resonance do I start thinking about container—the form that will hold it. And even then, the question isn’t, “How do I make this fit a standard essay?” It’s, “What kind of home does this thing need?”

Sometimes the container is a poem—tight and luminous, where every word is a bead on a string. Sometimes it’s a short story, where the line becomes dialogue or narration. Sometimes it’s a letter I’ll never send, or a longform article that wanders through themes the way I wander through cities. The important thing is that the form fits the rhythm and truth of the line—it doesn’t strip it of what made it matter to me in the first place.

This is the stage where the gap between my process—the GLP way—and the way schools teach writing yawns the widest. In most classrooms, by the time you’ve finished “planning,” the container has already been decided for you. The assignment says it’s a five-paragraph essay, so it will be a five-paragraph essay—no matter what the content feels like, no matter the rhythm it carries. The form is fixed before you’ve even had a chance to ask the piece what it wants to be.

But for me, the container never comes first. The gestalt doesn’t arrive with a tidy label saying “I am an essay” or “I am a letter.” I don’t choose the form at the start—I wait. I live with the echo, I steep in the resonance, and only then do I begin to hear what shape the piece is asking for. Sometimes it leans toward the taut economy of a poem. Sometimes it stretches out into the winding looseness of a personal narrative. And sometimes, mid-way through what was meant to be a serious longform article, a poem sidles in unannounced—cheeky, insistent—demanding to be included. It might perch in the middle of the piece like a bird on a wire, or tuck itself away at the end, as if to say, Yes, this is all true, but here’s another way to hear it. (I do get comments from readers about this seemingly random thing I sometimes do, putting poems in the middle of articles…)

In school, this approach tends to make teachers cross. They see it as going off-task, refusing to follow directions. They ask where my outline is, where my thesis statement is, why I’ve turned in something that doesn’t look like the model they provided. What they don’t see is that I’m not being contrary—I’m following the only process that actually works for me. By the time I’ve reached the container stage, the form has revealed itself. Forcing it into a pre-assigned mould would mean breaking it apart, losing the thing that made it worth writing in the first place.

And so my process is never the neat sequence they want—sentence > paragraph > essay. It’s always gestalt > echo > resonance > container. Sometimes that loop happens quickly, sometimes it spirals for weeks, but it’s the only way I end up with something that feels like itself. The mismatch isn’t that I can’t write in the set forms schools require—it’s that my writing can’t begin there. It has to grow its own skin before it’s ready to be dressed.

Practical Adaptations by Role

For Teachers: Making Space for the Whole Process

If you’re teaching GLPs, you have to remember that what you see on the page is only the last layer of a much longer journey. That “final draft” has probably been echoing in their heads, looping and shifting, long before they wrote anything down. The neatest way to honour that is through portfolio assessment—collecting work over time, not just grading a one-off timed piece. Timed writes reward those who can produce analytic, linear writing quickly; portfolios let you see the slow-burn development of voice, rhythm, and meaning.

When possible, let assignments live in multiple modes before they have to live only on paper. A student might start with a voice recording, then pull images that match the mood, then add captions or dialogue before ever attempting a full paragraph. Multimodal drafts—voice and text, image and caption—allow GLPs to preserve the emotional and sensory truth of a piece while building toward the written form at a pace that doesn’t strip away resonance.

And please, align your expectations with where the student actually is in their language process. If they’re still in early stages, don’t expect mastery of topic sentences or transitions. That’s not “lowering the bar”—it’s meeting them where they are. Give them room to linger in gestalts and echoes before pushing toward analytic structure. When the container is ready, it will hold more than you think.

For SEND / IEP / 504 Teams: Writing Support Into the Plan

Unfortunately, not every teacher will instinctively understand, or even agree with, the level of flexibility GLPs need in their writing process. Some will give you the space without question; others will stick firmly to the brief. That’s why it’s vital to bake these supports into the IEP, 504 plan, or whatever your country’s equivalent is—so they’re not subject to individual interpretation or the luck of the timetable.

When you write accommodations, name the tools and time explicitly. “Access to voice-to-text” sounds fine in theory, but in practice, does the student know how to use it? Has someone shown them how to store those first messy voice drafts and turn them into written form later? “Extra time on written assignments” needs to specify whether that time is for drafting, revising, or both—and whether the student can work in a quiet space to avoid the cognitive drain of a noisy classroom.

If the student needs to start with a voice recording, an image sequence, or a mind map before writing, write that in. Use language like: Student may produce pre-writing in multimodal formats (audio, visual, or mixed) before transitioning to written text. If they need to bypass standard graphic organisers, say so: Alternative planning tools permitted—student may submit mind maps, storyboards, or recorded outlines instead of teacher-provided templates.

Most importantly, put in protections against premature evaluation. A GLP who is still in the gestalt or echo stage should not be graded against a rubric that assumes a finished container. This can be spelled out: Written work will be assessed on alignment to student’s current language stage, not solely on analytic structure.

By codifying these supports, you’re creating a safety net that recognises process as much as product. You’re making it clear that this isn’t “special treatment”—it’s access. You’re telling the student, and the adults around them, that their way of moving from gestalt to container is not only valid but protected. And you’re removing the most dangerous variable of all: the chance that a single teacher’s preference could derail an entire year’s worth of development.

Sample IEP / 504 Accommodation Language for GLP Writing Support

Access to Alternative Planning Tools

• Student may use alternative pre-writing formats in place of standard graphic organisers, including but not limited to mind maps, storyboards, image sequences, annotated screenshots, or audio-recorded outlines.

• Student is not required to complete teacher-provided planning sheets if these do not align with their processing style. Equivalent pre-writing evidence will be accepted.

Multimodal Pre-Writing and Drafting

• Student may produce initial drafts in multimodal form, including audio recordings, visual storyboards, or a combination of formats before converting to written text.

• Speech-to-text software, transcription tools, or other assistive technology will be available for use during drafting.

Extended Process Time

• Extended time will be provided for all stages of the writing process (idea generation, drafting, and revision) to allow for the student’s language processing style.

• Deadlines will take into account the need for iterative drafting and revisiting earlier stages (gestalt, echo, resonance) before producing a final container.

Flexible Output Formats

• Final written work may take varied forms (narrative, poetry, dialogue script, mixed media) if aligned with the assignment’s learning objectives.

• When an analytic structure (e.g., five-paragraph essay) is required for assessment purposes, scaffolded support will be provided to translate the student’s preferred container into the required form without erasing original meaning or rhythm.

Assessment Aligned to Language Stage

• Written work will be evaluated according to the student’s current stage of language development and narrative organisation, not solely against analytic structure criteria.

• Content, voice, and coherence will be prioritised over adherence to predetermined structural templates in formative assessments.

Environment and Sensory Considerations

• Access to a quiet, low-stimulation environment will be provided for extended writing tasks to support language retrieval and organisation.

• Opportunities for movement breaks during long writing sessions will be offered without penalty.

For Parents: Valuing the Story Before the Sentence

When these supports are written into a plan, they protect the student in school. But IEPs and formal accommodations only go so far—they don’t reach into the kitchen table, the living room floor, or the back seat of the car where so much of a GLP’s real language work happens. And for parents—whether your child is in school or you’re teaching them at home—your role in protecting and nurturing that process is just as vital.

It’s natural to want your child to “catch up” to whatever point the curriculum says they should have reached. No one wants their child left behind. But with GLPs, trying to accelerate them into the school’s timeline can mean skipping the very phases of language that make it worth having in the first place. The pressure to get them writing neatly, spelling correctly, and punctuating on schedule can come at the cost of their relationship with language.

In the early phases, value the storytelling more than the surface mechanics. If your child spins long sagas in conversation, or creates entire worlds in dialogue for their toys, that is writing in its most essential form—it just hasn’t been written down yet. Treat those spoken narratives as the raw material they are. You can record them (with your child’s permission), transcribe them, and then play with them together—reading them aloud, acting them out, illustrating the scenes. This tells your child that their voice matters long before it meets paper.

If you’re homeschooling and haven’t had formal training in literacy development, please don’t feel you need to recreate the rigid school sequence of sentence > paragraph > essay—and be mindful that some of the most popular homeschool programmes, like Analytical Grammar, are wholly unfit for purpose when it comes to GLPs. Those systems are built for analytic processors, with an emphasis on rules, parsing, and structural precision that can crush a gestalt-based voice before it’s had a chance to form. Instead, meet your child in the phase they’re in: let them narrate as you write, co-create illustrated books, work with audio first, or build from remembered lines that matter to them. Your role isn’t to rush them toward analytic structure, but to help them explore and enjoy the language they already carry—so that when they do write, it’s their own voice on the page, not a forced imitation of someone else’s.

Writing is a translation of inner language into outer form. Honour the richness of that inner language now, and you’ll be laying the foundation for a written voice that’s theirs—authentic, resonant, and ready in its own time, not bent into shape before it was ready to stand.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve essentially been sitting in on one of my classes—learning something you won’t find in a teacher-training manual, or in the big therapy textbooks, or in the curriculum guides that leave GLPs out of the picture entirely. I offer this without a paywall, because I believe access matters, and because too many of us have already been locked out of the rooms where this kind of knowledge should have been shared. But deep dives like this take time, energy, and the kind of focus that doesn’t come cheap when you live in a body and mind that have to navigate the world as I do. Paid subscriptions are what sustain my ability to keep doing this work—so if you find these pieces useful, resonant, or worth passing on, your support is both felt and appreciated.

Troubleshooting & Common Pushbacks

People will say, sometimes with that faintly pitying tilt to their voice, that this isn’t real writing—as though the only writing worth the name is the kind that happens in a cabin by the lake, a solitary white man at his manual typewriter, progressing word by perfect word until the stack of pages beside him grows tall enough to become The Great American Novel. That vision—so rooted in whiteness, in linearity, in the myth of genius—doesn’t make room for us. It imagines writing as a solitary march forward, each word locking neatly into place behind the last, no backtracking, no looping, no mess. But GLPs don’t move like that. We don’t begin at the beginning and work toward the end. Our words don’t pile up in tidy stacks—they scatter, ricochet, repeat, hide, resurface.

And yet, what we do is no less writing. Storytelling is writing. Echo is writing. A remembered line scribbled in the margin is writing. The poem that slips, uninvited but perfect, into the middle of an article is writing. We are not the cabin-by-the-lake novelist—if anything, we’re closer to Finding Forrester, where the writing begins in conversation, in the back-and-forth of mentoring, in the trust that allows the words to come at all. Sometimes we need another person in the room to get the engine turning—someone to listen, to type whilst we speak, to reflect our phrasing back to us so we can hear it differently. That, too, is writing. The question isn’t does this look like their writing? It’s does this sound like mine?

And then comes the pronouncement—delivered with that quiet, unshakable certainty—that “they’ll never learn to write essays this way.” But we will. If we choose to. If the moment calls for it. If the voice we’ve built is strong enough to survive the translation into that form without losing its rhythm. I know, because my first publicly facing short article was published on Thursday, September 20, 2007, with my mentor’s help. I was thirty-six at the time, working toward completing my BA, and I needed that presence beside me—not to tell me what to say, but to help me trust the saying of it. That piece, Forensic Uses of Adobe’s Photoshop, still lives online. It’s short, direct, and nothing in its tone would betray how long it had taken me to get to that starting line—nor would it hint at what came next. That single article opened the door to writing and later became Forensic Photoshop in 2008, the smash bestseller that took me quite literally around the world, speaking, teaching, and building a career I couldn’t have imagined when I first sat down to write with my mentor at my side.

Since then, I’ve written almost 5,000 pieces of varying lengths and formats, from bite-sized technical notes to long, recursive essays like this one, as well as publishing ten books. My short fiction collection and my poetry collection both grew into expanded second editions just this past summer. The skill came—not because someone forced me into an essay mould before I was ready, but because when the stage was right, I could step into that form without sacrificing my own cadence. The shape of the piece grew from within. It always does, when you give it that chance.

And yet, the pushback: “We don’t have time for this.” That’s the capitalist clock speaking, the stopwatch that mistakes speed for progress and output for worth. The creative process—especially for GLPs—takes time, space, and energy. It needs to breathe. It needs to circle back, to rest, to double over itself, to meander. It needs to play with form, to test out voices, to dance a little and sing itself into coherence before anyone asks it to stand to attention. And when we allow that—when we give it the room it needs—resistance melts. Burnout eases. And in the end, the work arrives sooner and truer than it ever could under the false urgency of someone else’s clock.

… not lesser

writing for us
is not sentence > paragraph > essay
not the chalkboard ladder rung by rung
not the cabin by the lake
with the clean white stack
waiting for the great american novel to appear

it is—

the half-remembered line
from a song that never quite ends
the echo of grandmother’s voice
caught in the corner of a tea cup
the way a story hides
in the creases of your hand
until the light tilts just right

we carry it in loops
not lines
in spirals
not scaffolds

gestalt > echo > resonance > container
again
again
again
until the shape fits the breath

and when it does—
it is not a lesser path
it is ours
and we are still walking it
long after their essays
have crumbled to dust

Closing: Writing as Reclamation

For GLPs, writing has never been about bending ourselves into the shape of someone else’s template. It’s not about ticking off the boxes of topic sentences and supporting details, or marching word by word toward a tidy conclusion. It’s about making the internal legible without losing its shape—about carrying the rhythm, the tone, the breath of the thing intact from mind to page. I didn’t start with essays. I started with gestalts—scraps of remembered phrasing, a scene that wouldn’t let go, the echo of something said in passing. I learned to live with them, let them deepen, and only then to find the container that could hold them without crushing their edges.

If you’ve read all the way to this point—thank you. It takes patience to walk this path with me, to linger in the loops and tangents and returns. I hope this guide has been what you were looking for, or perhaps what you didn’t know you needed. If it speaks to you, I’d be grateful if you shared it with someone who might need it too. And if you’re in a position to support the work with a paid subscription—thank you in advance; it makes all the difference in keeping these deep dives possible.

Writing for us is not sentence > paragraph > essay.
It’s gestalt > echo > resonance > container.
And that is not a lesser path—it’s ours.