I argue for the fact that Writing must be Principled. Reading and writing are to be acquired as communicative skills, thus the more we employ strategies and approaches to develop these skills, the more fluent and accurate our Ss will be.

First of all, I arrange process writing 1. schemata activation, motivation for the language, prepraration for the language, 2. thesis development, paragraph development, choice of cohesive devices, writing from notes, ending up with a given phrase, following a plan, following a format and register, solving a problem 3. reflection on spelling and reasoning errors, sharing the writing with the group, peer editing.

Teaching writing is a "long-term project" (Davies, 2008) beginning from the 3rd grade through the 11th grade in Russia. Ss write a lot of compositions in Russian. When we start writing in English, that's a real "dual" or a very anxious process because Ss tend to write it in Russian, then translate it into English.

So, I encourage my Ss not to do so by brainstorming/eliciting and together with learners go over the mistakes, looking at the sources, going as deep as necessary for the learner to distinguish "what's being produced" and "what should be produced". The result is composition or essay in English: neither taken from a book nor written by anybody. Though it's a tedious process and I explain my Ss the reasons to go through all these stages of writing from data collection to publishing. This principled writing does a lot of good during the exams.

Do your students fear of writing? How do you start teaching writing? Should it be so strictly principled?