Graham and Harris 1999 conducted a meta-analysis on instructional approaches for teaching written expression to students with learning disabilities. Based on their analysis, the following three components stood out as consistently leading to improved outcomes in teaching expressive writing to learners with learning disabilities:

• Adhering to a basic framework of planning, writing, and revision.
• Explicitly teaching critical steps in the writing process through modeling. Explicit teaching of how to write different types of expressive text. The more explicit the examples, the more effectively students learn these writing conventions (i.e. components for an essay, a thesis and supporting arguments and/or a narrative writing, characters, theme, etc.).
• Providing feedback requires showing learners how to develop and organize what they want to say and guiding them in the process of getting it down on paper. Feedback can be about the quality of work, missing pieces, and the strength of their work. Feedback from a practitioner or a peer helps learners develop a writing style. This process is combined with ongoing instruction. It takes learners through self-reflection, realization and redress of problems.⁴⁴

Most of the strategies use a basic framework based on planning, writing and revising, modeling and providing feedback. The steps are not necessary linear, for example learners may revisit the planning stage during their writing process, if they are running into organizational difficulties based on the feedback given by the practitioner.

The following two strategies incorporate the three components:

Cognitive strategy - instruction in writing (Englert et al.,1995; Englert & Mariage,1991). This strategy includes brainstorming strategies for preparing to write, organizing strategies to relate and categorize ideas, comprehension strategies as students read and gather information for their writing, and monitoring strategies as they clarify their thoughts and the relationships among their items of information. All of these strategies are applied prior to the actual writing.⁴⁵