3 Tools to Help Autistic and 2e Students Write

Twice exceptionality, and autism specifically, presents unique challenges when it comes to writing. Autistic and 2e students may struggle to understand ambiguous instructions, and weak Theory of Mind (i.e., perspective taking) can make it tricky to imagine how a reader will respond to a draft. More generally, the whole writing process can feel abstract and overwhelmingly open-ended. 

Through my work as a tutor, I’ve developed lots of strategies to navigate these challenges. Here are some of my favorites.

The challenge: Taking another person’s perspective

Autism is characterized by impaired Theory of Mind, or difficulty seeing from another person’s perspective. When writing, autistic students often struggle to sort out what their reader would and wouldn’t know about a given topic. I’ve noticed that autistic students sometimes:

• Forget to spell out acronyms

• Assume that specific knowledge is common knowledge (e.g., that everyone will know the rules of a fairly obscure video game)

• Use pronouns or vague terms (“this,” “it,” “the thing”), not realizing that a reader won’t understand what they’re referring to

  
  

The solution: Map out what the reader knows

We can take the mystery out of perspective-taking by explicitly laying out the reader’s knowledge. Here’s how I might talk through this chart with a student:

Lucy: Okay, you’re writing a college essay that will be read by admissions officers. If the reader has never met you, will they know that Claire is your friend?

Student: I don’t know.

Lucy: I’m going to say probably not. There are a lot of Claires out there. What about RC? Will they know that acronym?

Student: Maybe not.

Lucy: Yeah, I wasn’t sure what that meant, either. But will they know what a robotics club is if you spell it out?

Student: I think a lot of schools have robotics clubs.

Lucy: I think so, too.

We might end up with something like this:

The challenge: Open-endedness

Open-endedness is hard, especially for autistic people. A question like, “How are you?” can have dozens of accurate answers. The instructions to “choose a current event and analyze it” could be followed a million different ways, and often, the sheer range of possibilities is so overwhelming that students become paralyzed.

The solution: Narrow down the options

To help solve this issue, I drew inspiration from an unlikely source: standardized tests. I started switching from an open-ended to a multiple-choice answer format, constraining students’ responses to a finite set of options. Here’s how I might do this with the open-ended prompt, “Write about your experience on the robotics team.”

Multiple choice: Which of the following skills did you develop through robotics?

Collaboration

Persistence

Creative problem-solving

Making sure all the robots are switched off after each practice so they don’t take over the school

Agree/disagree: How would you rate the statement, “Robotics club taught me the importance of teamwork?”

agree

neutral

disagree

Ratings: On a scale of zero to 10, where zero is “not at all” and 10 is the most possible, how much has robotics club taught you about teamwork?

A note on implementation: There are a few ways to use this strategy:

1. A teacher, tutor, or parent could reformat the questions without input from the student.

2. A teacher/tutor/parent could collaborate with the student to reformat the questions.

3. The student could reformat the questions independently.

The first time you try this approach, I would recommend method one (a support person providing options). Having the student generate the answer options would defeat the purpose of the exercise, the idea being that the student is struggling to write without scaffolding. But if this strategy becomes a go-to and the student consistently finds it helpful, they could absolutely learn to reformat questions on their own. AI can be a fantastic resource here, too:

The challenge: Difficulty conjuring words

Pulling words out of thin air is hard. You could think of this as another iteration of the open-endedness problem. There are so many words out there. How do you know which ones to choose?

The solution: Follow sentence patterns

Mad-Libs isn’t just a great way to teach parts of speech; it’s also a highly underrated writing strategy. Mad-Libs constraints options, and it turns writing into a logic puzzle. Lay out a few different sentence templates, then have students fill in the blanks to make their own sentences:

The author’s core argument is that ______.

They give the example of _______ to demonstrate (that) ______.

This quote highlights ________.

By pointing out ______, the author calls our attention to _______.

Mad-Libs-style prompts can also help students understand different sentence structures–without the need for complex grammar terminology. I have students practice combining and separating sentences according to different patterns. As with the previous strategy, I would start by having a teacher/tutor/parent provide the sentence patterns so the student can focus on filling in the blanks or combining sentences. When they feel more comfortable doing so, students can begin to generate Mad-Libs themselves.

Pattern #1: Coordinating Conjunctions

Pattern #2: Appositives

What it looks like in practice

These three strategies can help transform ambiguous, open-ended writing prompts into concrete puzzles to solve. I think of the strategies as tools, not rigid instructions. I’d highly recommend tweaking and playing around with them until you find something that works. Here are some concrete examples of how you might use them while supporting an autistic student.

Assignment #1: Write a paragraph about how you spent your summer (elementary school).

• Make a checklist of summer activities and have the student check off what they did.

• Provide Mad-Libs-style sentence starters to help organize ideas: “This summer, I…”/“I especially enjoyed…”/ “First/next/last…”

• Sketch out what the audience (fellow classmates) do and don’t know. Add clarification to the writing accordingly (“Jimmy is my younger brother”).

Assignment #2: Write a paper analyzing a collection of poems.

• Make multiple-choice lists of literary devices studied in the class. Use those to identify devices in the poems.

• Turn the assignment instructions into Mad-Libs-style statements:

  • Provide historical context regarding the poet. → The poet was born in ______ and belongs to the ______ literary movement.

  • Describe a major theme in the poem and explain how it’s conveyed. → The poet conveys the theme of ________ by ________.

  • Close-read the poems. → The use of the words _______ and ______ suggests ______.

• Make a “what does the reader know?” chart for the historical context section, separating common knowledge from topic-specific knowledge.

About Lucy: I graduated from Stanford in 2024 with a degree in psychology and Slavic Studies. I currently live in Boston and work as a writing tutor with a focus on supporting 2e/neurodivergent students. I've been involved in the neurodiversity world since I was diagnosed with autism at age 18. I hope to pursue a PhD in psychology and develop evidence-based interventions to help neurodivergent students write. For tutoring inquiries, please check out my website!